Much higher gravity than anticipated.

joedonlon13

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So I made a strawberry helles, added 3# homemade strawberry jam at flame out, og is 1.080. I pitched Wyeast kolsch strain as a 600ml starter at 60 F.. Will I have problems? Off flavors? Stuck fermentation?
 
Hopefully it was a fresh pack and you aerated well. If so, you should be OK. Both of Wyeast's Kolsch strains are listed as having alcohol tolerance of 10%. Definitely under pitched, but the low fermentation temp should suppress some of the expected off flavors.
 
Most jams have a huge amount of table sugar added to them. This would explain why you overshot your OG by a wide margin. I'm not sure jam is the best option to get fruit into your beer. It introduces lots of extra sugars and much of the delicate fruit flavour is lost during the jam making process. You'll get more of a cooked jam flavour rather than bright fresh fruit if much of the fruit flavour survives the primary fermentation. You may want to consider adding pasteurized fresh fruit in secondary in the future to preserve more of the flavour.
 
You should have anticipated the OG based on the sugar addition. There's a yeast calculator in the recipe edit section. You can figure out pretty quickly how much underpitched your yeast is.
 
Most jams have a huge amount of table sugar added to them. This would explain why you overshot your OG by a wide margin. I'm not sure jam is the best option to get fruit into your beer. It introduces lots of extra sugars and much of the delicate fruit flavour is lost during the jam making process. You'll get more of a cooked jam flavour rather than bright fresh fruit if much of the fruit flavour survives the primary fermentation. You may want to consider adding pasteurized fresh fruit in secondary in the future to preserve more of the flavour.
I do have 3# of starwberries we picked in the summer and froze whole that I plan on adding during the secondary...Thank you
 
Hopefully it was a fresh pack and you aerated well. If so, you should be OK. Both of Wyeast's Kolsch strains are listed as having alcohol tolerance of 10%. Definitely under pitched, but the low fermentation temp should suppress some of the expected off flavors.
Thanks for the insight, I'm still trying to get my pitch rates right, maybe I should have started the yeast 2 days earlier and built it up to 1200ml...Yeast was fresh and wort aerated well, I plan on raising the temp by 5 degrees in a couple of days.
 
You should have anticipated the OG based on the sugar addition. There's a yeast calculator in the recipe edit section. You can figure out pretty quickly how much underpitched your yeast is.
Thanks, I will definitely check that out.
 
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Most jams have a huge amount of table sugar added to them. This would explain why you overshot your OG by a wide margin. I'm not sure jam is the best option to get fruit into your beer. It introduces lots of extra sugars and much of the delicate fruit flavour is lost during the jam making process. You'll get more of a cooked jam flavour rather than bright fresh fruit if much of the fruit flavour survives the primary fermentation. You may want to consider adding pasteurized fresh fruit in secondary in the future to preserve more of the flavour.
You may need to find some pectinase enzymes to cut the pectin out of the brew and avoid the haze.
 

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