Yes,I know this has been beaten to death. Just looking for some quick advice. Long story short. My wife left the garage door open and let my two fermenters get too cold - about 50 degrees. Both beers appeared to have pooped out on me at that point. It's been well over a week and they're stuck and haven't shown much activity since that fateful day. Thanks Honey! They are at 1.035 and 1.030 on two different porters that I was hoping to get down to roughly 1.020. OG was at 1.059. OK, obviously I could just accept it and drink them anyway. They'll be 3.5% to 4.0%, but I'm assuming pretty sweet. Not the end of the world, I guess. Or, I thought about throwing some slurry from some London 3 in there in a couple of weeks (getting ready to brew a NEIPA this week) to see if it will roust it and finish it up a bit more. Thoughts? Really wanted to bring some down to Nashville for some buddies over New Years.
First time using it. But, I did use distilled water to callibrate it. It was only off .02 to begin with. It is an ATC refractometer, but I still made sure that it was close to room temp. I "think" that I'm using it correctly.
A refractometer can only be used for beer (fermented wort) if you correct the value for the ethanol present in the beer (the ethanol will raise the brix value, so it seems like gravity is actually higher than it is). Luckily there are some handy calculators out there for this. I like to use this one: http://seanterrill.com/2012/01/06/refractometer-calculator/ Just enter the original brix value (in your case probably close to 15 if you're OG was 1.059) and the final brix value (in your case probably close to 8-9 if you say it shows you 1.030-1.035) and it will output an FG (1.019 for 9 brix or 1.015 for 8 brix in my simulated case). So your porters do seem to have attenuated correctly!
I"d estimate that about half of the stuck fermentation problems I've seen on the forums have turned out to be first time refractometer users.
But no one addressed whether he should tell his wife this or just let her think she jacked up his beer
