First Homebrew, worried about fermentation

I think your beer is probably done. I would give it till next Wednesday to be sure but for some reason a lot of extract kits seem to hit a wall at 1.020. I haven't personally experienced this but have seen it come up enough on homebrew websites that it seems to be a legitimate thing. You can swirl it and put it somewhere else to warm up to maybe 74 but it may not change.
On a more positive note, congratulations you made beer!

 

Your beer is most likely done in the sense that it has fermented all of the sugar that it is going to. However, a few extra days in primary is beneficial to clean up off flavors. You'll see a lot of opinions here on this last point. Personally, I usually do 2 weeks in primary for a moderate gravity ale.

Since you swirled the beer, I would definitely give it a few more days in primary so the yeast that is now in suspension will settle back down.

There can be a lot of reasons why your beer finished at 1.020. When I first started brewing with extract a long time ago it seemed like I could never get a beer under 1.020. This was especially true with beers that had dark malt extracts. The other likely culprit is fermentation practices. Old yeast, not pitching enough yeast, poor aeration, pitching too hot, etc. could all impact yeast health.

 

You mention that you pitched the yeast while the wort was still hot. What temp was it when you pitched it? Guys, is it possible that if the wort was "hot" when he pitched, some but not all of the yeast cells died and that, in combination with fermenting fast due to the warmer than ideal start, could have had the batch finishing at 1.020? I'm not sure if you'd want to just keep it at 1.020 and package or if you'd want to maybe throw some more yeast in there to eat away at more sugars. 1.020 could make the beer taste sweeter than you want but not the end of the world (depending on how much this irks you).

I should brew a Dunkel. Sounds nice. Good luck!

 

What do you mean by too hot? That could factor in to that 1020 you got. Some died. Others were shocked. The strong ones gave you what they could. Could be any number of things, but you got beer to happen and know better not to do that again.
Maybe follow advice of pitching some more in to take over. Or. While you're ignoring them. They may just decide to poop out another point or two as they clean up.

 

Besides having a poor yeast pitch for the various reasons mentioned above, the other major cause of a high FG reading is that you don't as as much liquid in the fermentor as what the recipe is supposed to make. If you have a 5-gallon recipe but only 4.5 gallons in the fermentor, the gravity reading will be high because you now have 'concentrated' beer. Take a close look at how much beer you have.

 

I'll echo what @MostlyNorwegian and @Curmudgeon said:

Be good to your yeast.

Your kit calls for a single packet of Munich Wheat, dropped into a 5Gal 1.54 OG without rehydrating. That's cutting it close. If you put it in at 90F than cooled it to 70F, you likely made your yeast unhappy. Unhappy workers do not work well.

 

In the future instead of pitching hot just cover sanitized bucket lid and wait until the next morning where it will at least be room temperature.

 

I doubt 92 degrees killed your yeast. If anything, yeast like a very warm environment.

You should not pitch at 92 though. The first problem is that while yeast will likely reproduce well at 92, they will also throw off some off flavors detrimental to your beer. The second reason is that the yeast will likely not be happy starting off at 92 wort temp, and then being chilled down to 70 fermentation tempt (which is really a temperature drop closer to 27 degrees than 22). Fermentation performance may have suffered as a result.

 

You have to be above 100 to start killing off yeast.
Doubt it's that. I'd adjust the volume to get the gravity you want and move on.

 

As others have already discussed pitching yeast into 92 degrees F wort will not kill the yeast. Having stated that it is not a 'good thing' to do from a production of beer perspective.

Cheers!

 

There are only a hand full of yeasts you want to deliberately pitch with that much heat coming in.
This is definitely not one of them.

 

Matt, which yeast strains would you pitch at 90 degrees F?

Cheers!

 

In addition to the reasons already mentioned, it could be that your estimated FG was not a good estimate or that the CO2 coming out of solution/temperature threw your hydrometer reading off.

 

I am not familiar with the kits from Brewer's Best but I have read numerous posts by others where some extracts are not very fermentable and they consequently obtained higher than anticipated FG values. Perhaps this is the case here?

Cheers!

 

Omega Hothead.
I'm itching to try out their Voss Kveik strain because it can work at those temps as well.
i.e. both make great strains for brewing in the summer because they don't care if you forget to leave the air conditioning on.

For what it does when being pitched warm. I like the Wyeast Ardenne's.

 

What have you found?

 

You can get Voss kveik in homebrew quantities from Yeast Bay. I believe it is the same strain as the Voss kveik sold by Omega, though I don't know that for a fact.