I brewed my first beer exactly 13 days ago, and today I took my first gravity reading. I've reached precisely my expected final gravity, but I still have a small amount of krausen floating on the surface of my beer. Also, when I tasted it, the beer had a strong acetaldehyde flavor. Everything looks good, it smells like beer; but my recipe called for two weeks fermentation, and it's clearly not completed. As I said, this is my first beer. Can someone tell me why it is fermenting so slowly and if it's a problem? Is there anything I should do? It's a brown ale, by the way. I never transferred it from the primary fermenter and don't plan to.
Well, we don't know what you did, so it's hard to say what you did wrong, if anything. Describing your process would be helpful. Also, from what you wrote, fermentation (i.e. attenuation from OG to FG) wasn't necessarily slow. It may have been, but we just don't know. Regarding the acetaldehyde (green apple, I assume) flavor. How much yeast did you pitch? How old was it? And how did you oxygenate the wort? Anyway, at this point, I would leave the beer on the yeast until the acetaldehyde is cleaned up.
