Help w/ Fermentation Issues

His beers are getting down to the gravity he's expecting in secondary, so I don't think unfermentable dextrins are the answer.

 

Oops, should have read more carefully... I will fall back to suggesting more oxygen. Also, do you rouse your yeast, i.e. give the carboy a swirl every day or 2 after the fermentation settles down? This will help keep some yeast in suspension so it has a better chance to do its job.

 

Upon rereading your original post, it is not clear to me that anything is necessarily (extremely) wrong here. You say that the beer comes to a screeching halt after a few days, but perhaps it has not really stopped, but simply slowed down significantly so that after 10 - 14 days it really has (mostly) finished. Then perhaps your transferring to the secondary does reactivate the yeast a bit.

The key bit of missing information in your original post is whether or not you measured the gravity just before transferring to the secondary. If you did and it was still high, then something a bit strange is going on. If not, then these beers may not be behaving all that strangely.

The fact that you don't vigorously aerate and don't use a starter can result in the occasional sluggish fermentation. Before I regularly aerated and used a starter I had beers whose fermentation profile was not ideal.

I use the following method for aerating, which works at least as well as an aquarium pump and airstone (which I use to use, but do not anymore). After transferring the wort to the carboy I plug the top with a stopper (no hole in it), and I set the timer for 5 minutes. I then rock the carboy back and forth on the floor so that the wort splashes fairly vigorously (which doesn't take too much rocking). After a minute I stop rocking and remove the stopper. Because the wort has absorbed some oxygen, the pressure is reduced in the carboy, and upon removing the stopper air rushes into the carboy. I then rock for another minute and again remove the stopper. Again air will rush in, but usually not quite as much. I continue this until air does not rush in anymore, which tells me that the wort is maximally aerated (with this method).

The advantage of this aeration method is its simplicity. I have also done it with a better bottle: in that case it is helpful to put a tennis ball underneath of the better bottle to support the bottle as you are doing this. The "corner" of the better bottle tends to collapse otherwise.

 

I think what utahbeerdude was asking is if you were also taking a gravity reading right before transferring to secondary. i.e. gravity could have been changing slowly between the time you decided it was stuck until the time you racked (even without visible activity), which you wouldn't know without another reading. At least I think that was what he meant.

 

I had something similar but not quite the same happen to me for first time. I was going to bottle from primary that had fermented while I was on vacation (12 days), and after moving the primary container, I started to get some bubbling, at about every 30 seconds. This lasted for maybe 20-30 minutes as I tried to decide what to do. As it subsided, I checked the FG and it was fine, so I bottled. Just curious what might have caused this "last gasp" bubbling? (FYI - the un-carbonated beer tasted fine).