Beer Forum

OK... I f-ed up. It happens. My first attempt at "guilt-free" weeknight brewing. My neighbor came buy and we started sampling different vintages during my 90 min boil. I totally spaced the 1 lb sucrose addition that I was going to do for the last 15 min. Doh!

So now I figure I'll do a secondary fermentation and feed the yeast the pound of sugar. #1) should I wait for the krausen to drop? and #2) how do I figure out my OG? Do I caculate it based on the gravity points that the sugar would have added to the original 1.060 beer? #3) when I pour the boiled and cooled sugar solution (heavy) into the beer, do I have to stir or rouse the yeast - or should I just rack on top of it instead?

Otherwise awesome brewday... Very clear mash runnings, good efficiency, super clear wort into the fermenter.


Mylo

I'm glad someone else did this. I recently did this with a Saison and just bottled yesterday. I waited for krausen to drop and then just added the pound. I figured the OG as if I had added it to the boil and the FG came out 1.022. Unfortunately it was several points higher than I wanted so I bottle conditioned with champaign yeast and did not put any priming sugar in, but it still tasted like a horse blanket. I will follow up after the first tasting.

No need to secondary. Let the yeast ferment for a few days to get used to breaking the long chain sugar then add the sucrose. Swirl the carboy around a little and you'll be just fine.

You'll be fine making a sanitary simple syrup as you've proposed. When I do this for my barleywine (theoretical OG 1.132), I boil things up in an Erlenmeyer flask and chill it down to pitching temps before adding. Things will mix fine on their own. There's no need to swirl the carboy. Yeast have a pretty specific agenda - they'll have no trouble finding those sugars.

yea I'd do what's been mentioned. later 1/4 of strong initial fermentation. make sure you boil for 15 minutes before you add to fermenter.

OK so I did this yesterday too...'cause I'm professional.
My question is, what should the gravity of the sugar solution I'm adding to the fermenter be?
Should I just go like 2 quarts of water for a lb of sugar? That's like a gravity of almost 1.2...does that matter?

I don't think it will matter - but if you use too much then your FG will be lower than you expect (and the flavor perhaps a little watered down). I used just enough to reasonably dissolve and pour it in.


Mylo

its shouldn't matter....once you pour it in the fermentor, it is diluted down a bunch.