Unexpected High Gravity IPA. What to do?

Fyi in the future you can add water, much like you would in extract brewing, to reach you target gravity. It helps to take a reading before boil end to sanitize. I generally take a reading before flame out so I can adjust. If you are using a hydrometer just cool before the reading.

As far as your beer now do you like barleywines? What yeast did you use? It is likely there won't be enough and you will not reach your target FG. This means you beer will taste maltier, and have a much thicker mouth. Wait until activity ends in your fermenter then taste it. Depending on taste you may have a nice barleywine so I would treat it as such.

 

What were your fermentables (types and amounts of grains, malt extracts, sugar, etc.)?
What was the actual (not planned) volume of your wort when you measured the gravity?
Was this a partial boil, topped up with water in the fermenter?

 

Yes, you could've added more water to top off the beer in the primary fermenter prior to pitching yeast. I sometimes do this with stovetop brewing my small BIAB test batches. If you do AG brewing, you could've also added some second runnings through the grain bed to thin it out a little bit.

There's no real need to use a secondary unless you are adding further adjuncts to the beer. I've had all of my beers fall pretty clear with no need for finings with just a primary fermentation unless i'm using a particularly lazy yeast (i'm looking at you, Windsor... ). Autolysis is largely a myth in small batch brewing. I've had beers sit for four months in the primary on the yeast cake with no ill effects.

Priming is pretty simple. First, let the beer sit in the primary for a good three weeks. I find this is the best balance of time over the yeast cake to produce a quality pale ale. If you used a good healthy yeast and pitched the right amount, the beer should be finished the primary fermentation within ten days to two weeks, and the extra week can be used by the yeast to clean up precursor alcohols (acetylaldehyde, diacetyl, etc.) and convert them into more flavorful esters. In that third week, go ahead and pitch your dry hops in your IPA right into the primary. I like to use a hops bag for this but to each his own.

Now, hopefully you used a good yeast strain and had some yeast energizer & yeast nutrients in your wort. For IPA's, I like: WLP001, WLP007, Pac-Man, Super San Diego or just good old Safale S05. WLP007 is a monster and it's one of two house strains that Stone Brewing uses. Stone knows IPA's. Most of these strains should be able to get you below the 1.020 hump with good nutrients/energizer and oxygenation at pitching. Make a 2 liter starter on a high gravity beer like that or pitch about three vials/packs.

If you're worried about bottle bombs, I would look at your grain bill and your final gravity reading. If your grain bill has a lot of unfermentable grains in it (darker roasted crystal malts, etc.), it might be a little higher FG than a grain bill with more base malts. Provided your beer is below 1.030 or so, you should be fine to prime normally. If you get a stuck fermentation with a lot of base malts left unfermented (due to alcohol level), you might consider pitching less priming sugar and instead pitching some stronger yeast that can survive high alcohol level. I would suggest pasteur champagne yeast for this and you can pitch it into your bottling bucket after hydrating it and rack onto it to mix it well.

I don't use tabs for priming, I use 3/4 cup of dextrose (corn sugar) dissolved into a cup of boiling water. Boil the water, add the sugar and stir to dissolve. Once it's completely dissolved and returns to a boil, it's sanitized and now considered a simple syrup. Pour it directly into your bottling bucket and rack the beer onto it to mix evenly, then bottle.

 

While I agree that yeast can clean up acetaldehyde and diacetyl, neither one is converted to esters. (Acetaldehyde is reduced to ethanol and diacetyl is reduced to 2,3-butanediol.)

 

Sharing you process and recipe will help you get better advice.

Try to learn from your mistakes, take notes, find out why you ended up with such a high O.G. Hopefully in six months you will look back on this experience, laugh, and chalk it up to a learning experience.
For this particular beer, I would dry hop the shit out of it, in the primary. Triple IPA, Barleywine?

Good luck moving forward!

 

I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't think we really know his true OG for sure yet, which is why I asked OP some questions. I've seen this movie before.

 

I put it in, and it should be 1.066.

Heres your problem.

60 min boil, and you did 5 gallons pre boil?

That has it around, 3.25g batch size for me if I started at 5 gallons pre boil. That makes it a 1.112 OG.

4.5 batch, meaning thats what you get finished with after fermentation and losses, would have it around 1.081 OG.

4 gallons of finished beer would be your best bet and it's around 1.091 it say for me, all of this is "rough" though. So with that said...

Your issue here is boil off rate and you didn't start with enough to begin with. You needed to start with 6.5 or 6.75 gallons probably when the boil started to end where you needed to be.

Your beer will probably be a bit less bitter and hoppy due to probably a 10% decrease in hop utilization due to the higher gravity.

You won't have a 11% beer though. The "potential" section of your hydro isn't worth looking at.

I'd suspect you'd go from 1.089 to maybe.. 1.020 with all that extract and crystal. Maybe. That'll be around a 9% abv beer, and probably sweet.

As for what to do going forward.. I personally would leave it. I've tried saving beers and it doesn't always pan out. I'd dry hop it with something aggressive and see what you have.

Oh, and ditch the carb drops.

 

Missing an OG high is never that big of a problem...unless you are brewing an IPA (oops), are already over 5 gal volume, and kegging

 

I normally hit my stuff high, and I'm slowly.. slowly changing my brewhouse efficiency to get it all to match perfect, but I'm "okay" with regularly hitting 1.065 versus 1.059 if that was the case. Normally it doesn't change me at much, and at some intervals, I'm within a point or 3 of where I wanted.

Normally it's calculating your volumes rates that screws people up, because volume and gravity will go hand in hand as you see here. Thats where all grain makes it a bigger challenge if you will over extract. Not that figuring the volumes is all that troublesome to begin with.

 

Bad flavor, who knows.. What was your hopping schedule and amounts?

Bottle bombs are easy to avoid. Control your fermentation temps, allow the beer to finish complete. Check it in 2 weeks, and see what you have. Give another 3 days, and check again. If it's the same you are probably done.

Use a priming calculator online to figure out your amounts. Make sure you know how much finished beer you have. You obviously don't have 5 gallons, and probably don't have 4 gallons from what I can figure when you go to bottle.

 

Also avoidance of bottle bombs includes the use of a scale that measures in grams if you don't already have one. 3/4 cup can be a pretty wide range of weights if you don't use an accurate scale.

On the dry hopping, dry hop it if you want it dry hopped. Otherwise don't. Only ask for suggestions on such a thing if you're really not sure whether you want it or not. Accept that any addition of hops does suck up a little wort and lower your final volume. Adding more hops sucks up more wort. It's just something you deal with if you want hops in your beer*.

*well, you could get hop extract, but that's a different thread

 

So, as a simple answer, I had what should have been an apa come in at ipa gravity, so I chose to dryhop the beer in primary. With 3oz of hops and again in secondary with three oz of hops. I was aiming for 45 ibus for my apa, I hope insane amounts of dryhopping will add percieved bitterness. As for your carbonation issues, I don't see how grain bill changes anything. Instead of carb tabs I would opt for priming sugars.

 

Not related to your original question - but here's your problem. Racking to a secondary will oxidize your beer. Skip this step, particularly true for IPAs. Your IPAs will get better instantaneously.

 

FTFY.

 

Yes, you're right. I am assuming the OP hasn't completely purged both fermenters and his siphon with CO2 prior to the transfer.

 

Now you're assuming he's using a siphon.

 

He could be pouring one bucket into another from the top of a ten foot tall foot-ladder.