Here's a tip: sanitize the top of a can of cheap beer and use it to rinse out your fermenter. All sanitizer solution should be allowed to completely drain from your fermenter and transfer hoses. If you've left too much sanitizing solution in your fermenter, the yeast could be literally poisoned. Just as your own appetite disappears when you get the flu, yeast won't ferment your wort when it's under the weather. Ever lose your appetite? Why? The yeast is ill. A genuine stuck fermentation can be summed up with a simple statement: The yeast has lost its appetite. Both of these beers involved warmer fermentation with lots of yeast.Īssuming you've eliminated these false alarms, you might really have a stuck fermentation. We've had a couple of batches ferment completely in 18 hours. Just because the airlock is quiet two days after you pitched your yeast, don't assume it's stuck. Use a glass carboy and rubber stopper for your primary fermenter so you can trust your airlock.
It may be just enough to cause your airlock to go quiet. When you use a plastic pail for a fermenter, you may discover that the gasket leaks. If you test your beer and the CO2 bubbles in the beer raise the hydrometer, giving you a false reading (shake off the bubbles and it sinks again), using a larger diameter jar may resolve that problem. If your airlock activity has stopped, don't assume the worst. Is it really stuck?Ī stuck fermentation can have many causes but before applying damage control, make sure that it really is stuck.
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It is still a decent beer and drinkable but let's look at how to avoid stuck fermentation in future batches. Much of the sugar in the batch doesn't ferment.
It ends up being much sweeter than intended. You'd expect it to finish somewhere around 1.014 or so. For example, a batch of Pale Ale starts out at a gravity of 1.056 that quits fermenting at 1.026. What is it?įermentation is said to be stuck when primary fermentation slows and stops well before the intended final gravity. There is a problem everyone encounters in homebrewing: Stuck Fermentation.
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