High FG bottling question?

I feel under modified malts may have led to higher fg than would be possible with the same grain bill today. I would suggest a short, high temp mash. I used this technique in a stout starting at 1.125 and finished at 1.039 iirc. I mashed at 160 for 45 minutes. I also used a lower attenuating yeast strain, and finally used lallemand cbc cask / bottling yeast to bottle as it will only use the simple priming sugars to carbonate and won't affect or metabolize the more complex sugars.

 

For big beers, 1.085 and up, I mash around 152-154. Usually In the primary for 2 weeks minimum and secondary for a month or more depending on what I am adding. As far as bottle conditioning I have not had much trouble except for way to early consumption. My IRS takes 3-5 months befor there is adequate carving. Good luck.

 

I think you may be thinking about this wrong.

You said
"My problem seems to be that if the yeast won't finish the wort, it won't finish priming sugar or if you add extra yeast it will chew the unfermented wort and drop the FG."

I believe this is misguided. You want the yeast to finish all of the fermentable short chain sugars in the wort. However, you want the wort to be so high in dextrins that the final gravity is high. If you can accomplish this, the yeast will be plenty hungry when you add the priming sugar and they will prime accordingly.

However, if you bottle early, while there are still fermentable short chain sugars in the wort, you run the risk (a pretty big risk) of having yeast continuing to metabolize these sugars in the bottle, resulting in bottle bombs. Unless you can pasteurize your beer, this is what I believe would happen under this scenario.

Therefore, you need to create a wort with lots of unfermentable sugar. I think you will probably need to make ingredient changes due to unavailability of period malts, which may have been undermodified. Use low diastatic power base malts . Use dextrin malt, carapils, etc. to add unfermentables. Mash at a high temp. Mash for a short time. You might be able to create the same effect, but the modern ingredients you end up using likely make a very different beer.

 

You might be interested in the Pope pale mild recipe that people on this site were brewing last year. I'm sure you can find it using the search function. The recipe came from Ron's site and there were some pretty good discussions in the threads. I know one revolved around a higher final gravity than most of us are accustomed to our homebrewing.

 

Based on the high FGs I've seen in some of those original recipes, including the Pope recipe, I'm inclined to think that it might have represented "final" gravity for a not-quite-finished beer going into the cask, where it then continued to ferment. This would of course be a terrible strategy for bottling.

I remember struggling mightily to reconcile those recipes with any sort of processes to hit those high predicted FGs assuming full attenuation.

 

You said exactly my sentiments looking at this going in. How to reconcile it? One thing that must be noted on at least the Younger's No.1 is that historically from the research on that website is that the Scots almost exclusively bottled beer and this is how they served it out of the pubs. They didn't have the cask tradition and were years ahead of the English (or different) by bottling large amounts of the beer. The old Younger's recipe comes along with a period bottle label so I'm inclined to say they bottled it. Was it mostly still? Also, professional brewers maybe used the technique of knowing exactly how their yeast would behave and bottle just before it hit a certain gravity. None of which I can comfortable do.

 

Is this the Eldridge Pope 1896 AK? Looks delicious. I've had an AK before called McMullins AK. A low gravity ale but super tasty. Had a nice copper color, malt, super fruity, slightly acidic/winey all at a gravity around 3.8 or something. I guess the meaning of AK is still unknown. That looks like a great recipe to bang out compared to these long ageing beasts I've been looking into. I'll look at the search function on these boards to find the exact recipe. I'm looking to get that old fashioned flavor back and get away from the lower attenuation of today's palette. I guess for style adherence final gravity means a lot but much lower gravities than what we are seeing in these recipes people are tending to call them cloying or even contemplate dumping it. I love the taste of malt sweetness. Thanks.

 

@BukowskiLiver care to share yer recipe?

 

Hopefully @patto1ro can pop in and clarify / help?

 

Here are the two threads that describe the Pope AK recipe and the results...
http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/group-brew-ak-comments-volunteers.196598/
http://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/eldridge-pope-ak-results.214226/

 

Scottish brewers sent out a lot of their beer in hogsheads to be bottled, but there were cask versions, too.

The FG's I list are the racking gravities. The FG of the beer when a consumer drank it would have been lower. Because it would have spent some time conditioning in the cask before bottling and in the bottle. It wasn't bottled by the brewer, but by the retailer.

 

I know what AK means:

A = a beer one gravity step below X (about 1045 in the late 19th century)
K = Keeping Beer