Stout problem

mished

Hi guys,

I am on my first attempt at brewing stout. I used Muntons stout kit and bought malt to add instead of sugar as recommended by the website.
It was to take 4 days to ferment and to reach 1008 but it is now day 14 and its still reading 1012 :eek:

Any ideas on what I can do ?

Thanks

Martyn1989

mished wrote: »

Hi guys,

I am on my first attempt at brewing stout. I used Muntons stout kit and bought malt to add instead of sugar as recommended by the website.
It was to take 4 days to ferment and to reach 1008 but it is now day 14 and its still reading 1012 :eek:

Any ideas on what I can do ?

Thanks

Dont worry about it. Your best off disregarding the kit insructions, 1.012 isnt bad.

As far as I know malt extract isn't as fermentable as pure dextrose. What is the quantity of the recipe and how much malt extract did you use?

Regardless, wait until you get a steady reading on your hydrometer then you can bottle it. It would even benefit from being left in the fermenter another week.

oblivious

yea 1.012 is bang on target, give it another week and bottle or keg it, Enjoy:)

mished

Thanks

Martyn its 40 pint Muntons Irish stout, there is 1kg of spraymalt added. Will leave it for another week and keep checking it.

Whats the best way to store it when its ready, I have a plastic keg would that be any good or am I better off looking for bottles

willabur

Leave it another week at least and don't check it too often. Everytime you open up the keg, tap etc you are leaving yourself open to an infection.

I use bottles for all my stouts and they work fine. I use the batch prime method of boiling up 2/3rd cup of sugar with water before combining with the beer (assuming 5 gallon batch)just before bottling.

sharingan

mished wrote: »

Whats the best way to store it when its ready, I have a plastic keg would that be any good or am I better off looking for bottles

Bottles. Kegs are fun and all, but bottles are more practical.

willabur

bottling is by far the most tedious part of the entire process.
But its a good deal cheaper than kegging. I would recommend that you go with swing top bottles, capping is a pain in the a**e as all bottles are different.

mished

Bottles sound better too wheres the best place to get them ?

willabur

ask in one of the craft brew pubs for second hand ones.
To get them new check out www.alpack.ie, they are based in sandyford. Works out at about 1.30 per 500ml bottle.
You could also just buy them with the beer already in there, some nice german Bock beers available with deals like 4 for 10 euro.

mished

great thanks for that info.. Can you use any second hand beer bottles ? I thought the ones in the shops with beer in them were single use, not strong enough for home brew and was told not to use them but that's a much better idea than buying empty ones

willabur

depends on the bottle to be honest.
Some are easily reuseable, others break really easy when capping which is infuriating as you have to throw out a full bottle of perfectly good beer

Look for bottles that have a thicker glass - e.g. I find the sierra nevada bottles break pretty easily while long neck bottles like Goose Island bottle fine. Again I would strongly encourage you to put the investment into swingtops from the start, its expensive to begin with but will save you heart ache.

Also another invaluable tip - rinse bottles immediately after pouring. Makes it so much easier when you get to the sanitising/bottling stage

mished

Brill thanks, I've had a look at that site and they have 30 x 500ml swing tops for 1.22 + vat. will go with them

Thanks for the rinsing tip, if you think of anymore please pass them on

Sky King

The other good thing about bottles instead of kegs is that you can give them to people to try.

Be aware of this with your swing tops! Maybe get some of the coopers screw-cap bottles for that purpose!

You'll need more than 30 bottles for your batch of stout remember.

mished

Thanks sky king,
with all the testing I've done I will be lucky to fill 30 bottles :eek:

Baneblade

i use the coopers bottles. a box of 24 are about €12

i also do a few glass bottles incase i want to give some away and not worry about getting them back, for those i reuse what i have lying around.
have never had much trouble capping them but i would hate to have to cap 40+ bottles each time.

as for it sitting at 1.012. i would not worry about it, all the kits i done have been around that and when i did a stout i had it in the fermenter 3 weeks

mished

thanks Baneblade where do you get the coopers bottles

Baneblade

most of the online shops i saw had them i got some from www.homebrewwest.ie and www.thehomebrewcompany.ie

mished

Thanks for that

Martyn1989

mished wrote: »

Thanks

Martyn its 40 pint Muntons Irish stout, there is 1kg of spraymalt added. Will leave it for another week and keep checking it.

Whats the best way to store it when its ready, I have a plastic keg would that be any good or am I better off looking for bottles

With regards to the finishing at 1.012, again don't worry. I had a batch of pale ale finish at 1.019 there and its still tasting nice. Not the ABV I was aiming for but still a decent beer.

As I mentioned the spraymalt is not as fermentable as the dextrose so when reading the kit instructions the expected FG was 1.008, in order to achieve that you would have needed a bit more spraymalt. Your stout will be slightly less alcoholic then you expected but you will have gained a vast improvement in flavour and body.

You seem to be swinging towards bottling but I got a plastic keg (pressure barrel) with my starter kit and only used it for my first 2 brews. They are handy but have their disadvantages, some of which are stated above (such as sharing out to friends, and living companions arn't impressed when most of the shelves are removed from the fridge to chill it). Make sure you have the cap with the pressure vent and the connection for the little C02/N cartridges. Prime the barrel with 80g dextrose and then when your pulling off the beer you can top it off with the little gas bulbs as the pressure of the barrel decreases. Most importantly make sure you remove the tap before filling and pull it apart and clean and sanitise it well, they are dirt traps. Im brewing my own stout soon and am putting it in the pressure barrel for topping up with the nitrogen cartridges to see if I can get the smooth Guinness style pour. This is mainly for curiosities sake as I can't find anything online about how successful it is.

Regardless of bottling or in the barrel you want to store the beer for about 3 weeks at approx 18C, then you can move it somewhere cooler if you wish. I always taste mine after 1 week, then 2 weeks but as the advanced homebrewers on here will say it really does take the third week for it to be properly carbonated and for the flavours to develop. Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

mished

Thanks Martyn great info.
Will have another think on the bottles / keg.. will the stout have a head on it like guinness does ? it does in the picture on the tin

willabur

I carbonate my beers at ~16 degrees, beer is carbonated after a week though it improves over time. Main lesson I have learned that beer is not too fussy, yeast cells are resilliant little buggers!!

willabur

mished wrote: »

Thanks Martyn great info.
Will have another think on the bottles / keg.. will the stout have a head on it like guinness does ? it does in the picture on the tin

depending on your process you should get something of a head when you pour the beer. This tends to dissipate rather rapidly.

One trick you can use is to get your hands on a plastic syringe - chemists sell them. Suck up a bit of your beer and then flush it back into the glass. Rushing air through the beer like this will give you a nice creamy head which should maintain itself down to the bottom of the glass. Back in the days before the widget Guinness 6packs used to come with its own syringe

something like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaqHxspJbyU

Martyn1989

mished wrote: »

Thanks Martyn great info.
Will have another think on the bottles / keg.. will the stout have a head on it like guinness does ? it does in the picture on the tin

Lol it should have a decent enough head with a rough pour but as willabur said it mightn't have the best retention. It won't have the same smooth texture as guinness but be more like the bottled version. The nitrogen is what gives the smooth texture/cascade/settling. Topping up the barrel with nitrogen has its own complications as without a proper stout tap (which aren't available for a pressure barrel) I could just end up with a glass of head. Its going to be a little experiment to see what'll happen.

I did a mexican cervesca and a harvest stout kit and had them in the barrel and if memory serves once the barrel was topped up with the bulb the head became quite foamy and stuck around for a bit. I think that was helped by only opening the tap a small bit when pouring as the beer was being agitated as it was forced out.
Ive included a pic of the first pour after the barrel being topped up with C02. Its very foamy and took about a small amount of time to settle in the glass and it seemed to be alot smoother.

If you deicide to put it in the barrel bottle up a few bottles aswell so you can try it both ways.

mished

thats a brill tip Wilabur thanks

mished

thanks for the photo Martyn...cant believe you spilled that lovely beer :eek:

good idea to try both keg & bottle cos we can see which the OH prefers though I will try some myself...purely for medicinal purposes

Yawns

I have some harvest stout in bottles. For the most part the head retention is poor. I can get a nice head onto the beer when pouring if I wish but it doesn't last. I wasn't expecting it to either. However for the last bottle I had, I did a nice easy pour and for some reason I got a lovely creamy half inch head that stayed the whole way down. Nice n creamy so it was

I too was thinking about kegging a stout in future and trying nitrogen bulbs. If you could please keep us updated on how this works out for you, I'd really appreciate it.

Martyn1989

mished wrote: »

thanks for the photo Martyn...cant believe you spilled that lovely beer :eek:

good idea to try both keg & bottle cos we can see which the OH prefers though I will try some myself...purely for medicinal purposes

You dont need to make excuse around here, where all in the same boat.

Martyn1989

Yawns wrote: »

I have some harvest stout in bottles. For the most part the head retention is poor. I can get a nice head onto the beer when pouring if I wish but it doesn't last. I wasn't expecting it to either. However for the last bottle I had, I did a nice easy pour and for some reason I got a lovely creamy half inch head that stayed the whole way down. Nice n creamy so it was

I too was thinking about kegging a stout in future and trying nitrogen bulbs. If you could please keep us updated on how this works out for you, I'd really appreciate it.

How long has the stout been bottled, head retention improves with age, especially in the earlier stages of maturation.

I will of course, Ill snap a few pics aswell, I wont be brewing the beer for another 2 weeks so its a while a way but Ill get there eventually.

Yawns

That batch of stout was bottled on 27th of November so quite a while ago. They all had very poor head retention but I didn't mind. It aged very well for me over the longer period too. It had a really heavy coffee aroma to it after 5 weeks but towards the 8 - 9 week mark it mellowed dramatically.

I had a few stored in my fathers fridge and the last one just turned out with a creamy head that lasted all the way down. Now that I think about it tho I had changed to a different shaped glass for the last 2 bottles. It would have been washed by my father in the dishwasher so could explain the first head retention issue, but it was just rinsed by myself for the second bottle which was epically good.

Sky King

Ye all know that using washing up liquid to clean the glasses kills the head right??

A dishwasher is the only way.

My stout and ale comes out lovely with a rough pour and the head lasts grand on it for the most part.

Yawns

The detergent & rinse aid in the dishwasher also affects the head. It's why pubs just wash their glasses in hot water in a dishwasher during the night.

The good pubs then use a scrubbing brush in a sink full of hot soapy water during the quiet days and run them thru a hot dishwasher for rinsing afterwards. Of course the good pubs clean their dishwashers too to remove all the nasty **** from it. No point scrubbing the glasses and rinsing them with filthy water.

That's what was drilled into me years ago in a pub and that pub still does it to this day. I do it wherever I work but the amount of lazy ****es who couldn't be bothered is still astounding.