How To Fix A Stuck Ferment : Help Fermentation Stopped Early!

hey guys how's it going I hope you're having a kick-ass week so this week I had plans to talk to you about stripping runs but these are the guys in here the yeast had another idea they followed my plans I have a stuck fermentation on my hands so that's what we're talking about this week hey you guys welcome to still it I'm Jesse and this is the channel all about chasing the craft of home distillation and making it a legitimate hobby so if that's what you're into have a look around if you dig what you see hit the subscribe button ring the little bell next to it so you get all the notifications and you won't miss anything alright guys like I said I found myself a stuck fermentation so when life gives you lemons you make lemonade we're gonna have a talk about all the possible things that could have caused this and how to fix them which I hope helps you guys out as well just before we get stuck into there I do want to say sorry for not doing any live streams I have noticed that every time I start doing more live streams it really hurts the views on my channel basically still it was growing like this I started doing live streams so I'm doing a little test to see if I'm gonna get a lift and basically just check my hypothesis if my hypothesis is correct I do want to keep doing live streams because they're fun I like hanging out with you guys but I may move them to another platform perhaps Facebook although I know some of you guys might have an issue with that maybe give me some suggestions on that down in the comments all right on to it like I said guys I really wanted to talk about stripping runs today but that isn't going to happen and honestly out of all the fermentations I've done mostly with beer not so much distilling I've had three stuck fermentations and all that time and every single one of them happened when I had plans based on the time that I expected the fermentation to finish it's almost like these little guys I've got a mind of their own and they love sabotaging my mmm-hmm in any case guys let's get stuck in and see if we can diagnose what the problem is the very first thing to note when talking about stuck the mutations and honestly fermentation in general as you really want to have as much information as you can to start with before you even know this a problem so the idea is you want to know what you're studying gravity was you want to know what you expect your final gravity to be and you want to be able to take accurate readings of your gravity at any point in time during the fermentation if you think there's a problem essentially what happens with fermentation normally as you start with a little bit of a lag period while the yeast is multiplying this is the amount of sugar by the way the fermentation kicks off with the hustle of raw so you get a big steep drop and the amount of sugar present in the word and then as you approach your final gravity the fermentation tapers out and slows down that's what you can expect to see what happens with a stuck fermentation is either it just never happens nothing takes off the yeast don't do anything to start with or fermentation looks like it's going right and then suddenly for whatever reason everything just grinds to a halt and you get left with the egg gravity that you weren't expecting and nothing's really happening so for me I was expecting this to get down pretty close to one maybe even a touch below actually and right now it is sitting at 10:20 and it's been here for about four days so I can pretty confidently say that I do have a stock fermentation and the only reason I can do that is because I have that information and I can accurately or relatively accurately measure the gravity of this work so first up guys make sure that you either have a hydrometer or a refractometer do this with and it is really I promise you going to be a lifesaver for the stuff like this so with that out of the way the first thing you want to do is decide whether or not you've had any action in the fermentation at all up to this point so did you get some life out of your yeast and then they peed it off or just basically nothing happened and your fermentation never really started or it just started and fizzled out the reason you want to ask yourself that is it gives you a really good indication of what's going on if you started out with a healthy fermentation and now you're somewhat stuck there's a pretty good chance that something has essentially slowed these down put them to sleep or even killed them off but we'll put that aside for now because that gets a little more complex and we'll go back and talk about what happens if you just had no life at all if you've had no life that's a pretty strong indication that something went wrong right at the time of pitching or even a little bit before that at this point depending on the type of work that you made or the type of watch that you made you want to ask yourself a few questions can you be sure that there is a good amount of sugar in that wash the yeast want to eat that's obviously a little bit more applicable if you're doing all green washers and you're not so sure of that situation I however am using straight sugar table sugar pretty much right out of the bag so I know that's not an issue the next thing you want to think about is the temperature of the wash when you pitch the did you perhaps pitch the yeast into a wash that was still too hot and Janique denature your yeast at that point in time did you give it enough nutrients did you give it enough oxygen dissolved into the liquid at the beginning to give it a healthy start and finally did you put enough healthy viable yeast to get the job done maybe your yeast was a dud maybe it was dead maybe you wait under pitched any of those things can cause signs of no life from the very beginning if you think this is what has happened to you the good news is that it is pretty easy to fix this situation all you need to do is make sure that the wash is a lovely place for your yeast to start with all of those things we just talked about and put more yeast if however you think that you did get some signs of life and the fermentation has petered out over a little bit of time there are a few more things you want to think about number one and the one that I run into most often both myself and talking to other people is temperature has the temperature of your fermenter gone too far in one of the extremes there's a still in that Goldilocks zone for the yeast that you're using has it got too hot or has it got too cold it's got too cold you may have essentially put your yeast to sleep or even flocculated them out of suspension and if it's got to warm you could have really stretched them out or potentially even killed them off now these things are very dependent on the strains of yeast you're using and the results you're hoping to get so you're going to want to check what the optimum temperature for your yeast if you think maybe you've gone too hot and have really killed the yeast off and to be honest you have to go pretty freakin hot that but I totally understand some of you guys in the desert yeah I get it if you've gone that way once again all you need to do is touch more yeast if however you've gone too cold what you can do is just slowly bring the temperature of that fermenter up and the yeast are more than likely gonna pick up right where they left off second of all you're gonna want to think about the alcohol tolerance of this strain of yeast you're using essentially what I'm saying is if you give yeast enough sugar eventually they will just basically cool themselves off with their own waste product they're going to get to a point where they can't do any more eating and they're just going to stop once again that is going to be based on the strain of yeast that you're using and to be honest if you're getting to that point you really want to look at your recipe and change the recipe because if you're stressing your yeast out that much on a recipe basis not on a mistake basis or on a out of your hands basis you definitely want to change things for next time there are also a bunch of yeasts out there that are just super flocculent and what that means is basically the yeast just wants to drop out of suspension sit on the bottom and it's going to be super super lazy now flocculation is actually a good thing we want the yeast to flocculate when fermentation has finished but we don't want to get lazy before the job is done generally if this happens generally the work will look relatively clear much clearer than you're expecting and sometimes giving the fermenter a gentle shake every now and again can encourage the yeast to stay in suspension when I say gentle I don't mean genes or just you know I can little swirl like that and the last thing to mention is that at the end of the day you're dealing with a live organism and sometimes it just doesn't do what you want it to do for whatever reason the yeast the fermentation gods are against you and it just doesn't work so with all of that said it's about time that I figure out exactly what's going on here so I know that I started at ten sixty five from memory jeez I should know that for sure about about ten sixty five I know that I had a really really strong fermentation to start with and I know that I'm now stuck at ten twenty when I was ideally hoping down to get down just below one so I know there's a whole lot of sugar left in this that I really want to utilize still so I know I've got to start fermentation and know that it started out well and I also know that that amount of alcohol for this yeast which is just a baker's yeast there's no problem whatsoever it'll easily ferment down from ten sixty five no problem there so I've got a pretty good idea that I had good healthy yeast to start with or it wouldn't have started the fermentation off as it did in the first thing that I want to look at is probably temperature and I'm guessing because I wasn't able to actively warm this I was just relying on insulation it has been a little bit cold and I've been slack I had been out here monitoring it every day I'm guessing I'm hoping that that's what this is just from feeling it yeah I'm guessing it's about sort of 1819 degrees and a and of that is true yeah I think that's the problem and basically I've been lazy and I have been out here taking care of it ideally I want this up so I'm more like 25 to 27 degrees somewhere around there the trusty IR thermometer is saying I'm at 21 degrees which is not as bad as I thought it was to be honest after feeling it but obviously not ideal I have been slack on there and I should have been keeping it a little bit warmer because I had that nice strong fermentation at the beginning I'm confident that there is enough yeast enough healthy yeast in there fermenter to get the job done if I can give it a little bit of a boost I'm gonna give it a little bit of a shake give a little bit of a stir up over the next day or two not actively stirring it I don't want to introduce more oxygen at this point in time but I do want to just encourage that yeast to stay up in suspension and I am gonna hook my little space saver heater up to a timer and set that up over here as well I am gonna try and bring the temperature up relatively slowly I don't want to jack it way up way quick and sort of surprise the yeast but I'm hoping there in the next sort of two days I can get activity on this fermentation and in at about five days from now I'll be done with fermentation that's what I'm hoping for anyway anyway guys the heaters hooked up I'm going to monitor it closely over the next 24 hours and try and find a nice sort of on-off schedule for the heater to ramp that temperature up a little sort of slowly and then another schedule to keep it consistent I'm gonna aim for 27 degrees to try and dry to finish it off to be honest even if everything goes perfectly from here on and it's probably not going to be finished by the time I need to get this video done but I will leave it to the very last minute to give you an update right before I need to get this video finished I am coming back a couple of days later guys the he's been working nicely we are up to we are now at 25 degrees we're still creeping up a little bit I've been taking it pretty slowly but we do have signs of life much more life than we had before and the gravity is starting to drop much quicker now as well so I'm hoping that I have managed to rescue this and it was all that was wrong we're now down to 10 16 and I expect that to start dropping pretty quickly from here on in anyway guys sorry I couldn't bring you the video I wanted to bring you this week I appreciate you being here and watching it anyway a little bit of housekeeping Singh as this is a probably likely to be a pretty short video first up the shirts they are ready there's links down below Threadless there was a little bit of problem at the beginning when I first ordered that they have been really good and sort of bit out so thank you very much three of us like I said guys check the links out down below if you're interested second of all I have to say a huge huge thank you to all the people that are signing up on patreon a thoroughly thoroughly appreciate it and I know you guys I know that you've been seeing on the patreon thing that you don't want any rewards or anything like that that's not why you're doing it I totally understand that you're not enough for a calendar or anything silly like that I'm thinking perhaps there is a way that I can reciprocate and say thank you for contributing to the channel by offering you more value a little bit more of what you already get here on still it but no matter what guys don't worry this channel is free it'll always be free and this will always be the number one priority for me oh yeah while we're here I did finally get around to oking all of the ug is in I did of course save some was white dog but this is now chilling I need to get some nice labels for these I need to get on to me anyway guys just thought you might want to know that these are okay and aging away nicely I've got plans to leave some for at least a year hopefully two if I can be there patient and some that I want to get into and about maybe three to six months I'm guessing I'll give you updates on that as we well it's that time of the video where I have to say thanks for watching team I really really appreciate it if you liked the video hit the thumbs up down below if you haven't done so already think about subscribing and I will catch you guys next time see ya

Channel: Still It

Views: 93,825

Keywords: stuck ferment, stuck fermenta, stalled ferment, stalled fermentation, fermentation stopped, fermentation stopped bubbling, fixing a fermentation, stalled, ferment, fermentation, wash, mash, wort, beer, help, still it, Jesse, chase the craft, homedistilling, stuck, fix, home distilling, bubble, bubbling, bubbles stoped, yeast, yeast stopped, homebrew, homebrewing

Id: Bcklw_wLFxM

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018