Beer Forum

A fermentation problem.
I made a a russian imperial stout three weeks ago. Original gravity was 1.094 and I'm stuck at 1.044.
I'm using wlp004 and pitched 500 ml of yeast slurry I harvested off a lower gravity previous brew.
I started at 67 and raised the temperature to 72 as fermentation slowed.

When I washed my yeast I'm thinking I didn't get as much yeast as I thought I did.
I'm thinking of buying another vial of wlp004 or wlp001 and making a starter and pitching at high krausen.
Is it possible to drop this beer below 1.030 or am I stuck with a imperial sweet stout?

Thanks,
JD

I'd say making a new, well-oxygenated starter (I'd use WLP001, it's a good attenuator) and pitching at high kraeusen is your best bet for getting fermentation going again. Hopefully you can squeeze a few more points out of it.

Forgot to mention:
I added two minutes of oxygen at initial yeast pitch
Initial yeast was added to a starter an ran on a plate for 12 hours.
I did a 120 minute as opposed to 90 minute boil on this beer because my volume came out about 1 gallon higher than I wanted after sparge.

I'm going to try the wlp001 at high krausen and hope for the best.

dunleav1 wrote:Forgot to mention:
I added two minutes of oxygen at initial yeast pitch
Initial yeast was added to a starter an ran on a plate for 12 hours.
I did a 120 minute as opposed to 90 minute boil on this beer because my volume came out about 1 gallon higher than I wanted after sparge.

I'm going to try the wlp001 at high krausen and hope for the best.

I ended up just letting the original yeast do it's job. After six months in secondary it was down to 1.037, which is the target FG for this recipe.

You could always try drying it out with some rehydrated Us-05, or lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast, or my personal favorite Brett B.

It's good, really fucking good.

I'm letting it age another 6 months like JZ recommends.


There is no need to dry it out anymore, I hit the FG for the recipe.

I just tapped this keg after a year. It's worth the wait.

I'm going to fill a few bottles of this for laying down to see how it ages.