no krausen

Do you know what the expected FG is? Nottingham usually attenuates well, so 1.022 sounds a bit high to me, but maybe it's to be expected based off of the rest of the recipe.

My guess is you did have krausen. It just came and went before you noticed it.

 

Relax don't worry is a pretty good choice. If your gravity is 1.022, it sounds like fermentation has occurred. Was there a 'bathtub ring' around the side of your fermentor? What is the expected FG for your recipe?

Also, If you are brewing a 1-gallon recipe and you got 163 oz. of wort and it had an OG of 1.082, did you ferment all of it? Something is wrong if you got that much wort when it should have been 128 oz?

 

You don't tell us why you pitched the second yeast 3 days after brewing? Did you measure gravity again? Or did you do it because there was no krausen? In 3 days the krausen may have come and gone already..... 3 days is about it for most standard fermentations, the rest of the time is the yeast finishing and cleaning up...

 

That means you made beer!!

Cheers!

 

Relax Sr. , your beer is way tooooooo young, figure it has about 8% of abv, this beer will need to be aged at least 5-6 months to let it mature otherwise you won`t let it reach its best performance.

 

This doesn't have anything to do with your fermentation, but I'm curious about the amounts of liquid that you mention which don't seem to add up for a 1-gallon recipe. Was the 163 oz. and OG of 1.082 pre-boil or post-boil? If you were aiming at 1.1 gallons of wort that would have given you 140 oz. to ferment, so the 163 oz. is about 20% higher than intended, yet your gravity reading was a whopping 1.082. Was this a recipe style for an imperial stout or barleywine? If so you should have had plenty of visual evidence of fermentation for a beer with an ABV like that.

 

Blow off / bubbles doesn't mean no krausen - was there any ring of gunk inside the bottle?

boil also doesn't have anything to do with krausen.

It won't hurt anything, but it may or may not help. At this point, you've fermented down - whether or not you're at final gravity, we don't know yet - if you test again in a few days, and it's at the same 1.022, then it's done fermenting, but not necessarily all yeast action is done/
@JackHorzempa Cheers buddy![/QUOTE]

Unless you're planning on aging for a long time, with fruit, wood or souring, don't bother secondary, especially for a 1-gal batch. Unless you plan to leave it be for 6-months or a year, you don't have to worry about autolyzation. We at homebrew scale, autolyzation is not something that really affects most of us. In the case of pros, if you have hundreds of gallons of beer pushing down on the yeast cake, that's where it starts to be a worry, and that's also with a lot of time.

 

i bottle bigger beers than that at week three. There is this mindset that these beers somehow need bulk aging, and I am not sure I agree.

 

I do the same. In another month or so I will be brewing another batch of Quad and I will bottle that batch (again) at three weeks.

I do not view bulk aging as a requirement. As far as I am concerned aging if aging whether that be in a bulk secondary vessel or the secondary containers know as bottles.

Cheers!

 

No, unless you are planning on wood, etc aging, there's no reason to sit in the carboy past fermentation. A few weeks in fermenter is plenty for 99.9% of beer - I personally give mine 3 weeks from brew till bottle. Never had an off batch or bottle bomb that I could relate to fermentation practices.

As far as the issue, since the gravity has dropped, you definitely have fermentation going on. Whether it's done at this point is another story. I didn't notice if you mentioned, but I would say to give it another week or so before testing again. You're barely a week out of brew, but things seem to be moving along. Be patient, don't rush anything along.

 

Looks like yeast to me. How's it smell and taste?

 

1082 to 1022 in five days sounds like the yeast pooped. Vomited. Pissed. Had sex. Ate the various, and plentiful sugars you gave them with 1082 of it to feast on. And while you weren't seeing that. Beer happened.
I'd be more inclined to worry if it were several points higher at this point.
Ignore it. They might not always give you a krausen, or much to look at in the bubbler. Especially with big bruiser beers. That doesn't mean they are slacking off.

 

Your yeast didn't get lazy after getting through the simple chained sugars. If they had. It would've been in the 1030s.
If you want to really know what your yeast are up to. Get a flashlight. The brighter. The better. Shine it directly into the carboys side. Habituate your eyes to the liquid edge, and watch.

 

Doesn't sound like infection. Carb it up!

 

It's yeast, and it's done. Time to bottle.