Question about FG and bottling

[jlittlechilds]

Hey All,

I'm totally new at this, and for my first batch, i forgot to stop the temperature fluctuation in my house (19 degrees during the day and down to 16 at night) on my auto thermometer, and i think it messed up my fermentation, as my OG was 1.065 and my FG was 1.045 ish. Like an idiot (looked up stuff afterwards, hindsight 20/20), i still bottled this beer knowing that the FG was super high and it likely didn't have a lot of alcohol in it, but whatever - it was my first batch and i'm gonna see it through.

i bottled a week ago and just took a gravity reading for shiggles and:

a) my bottle wasn't a bomb and didn't explode - yay!
b) it wasn't nearly as sweet as when it went in
c) my gravity reading and it was 1.01

There wasn't a ton of carbonation so i didn't think it would ferment that much. I drank the bottle (500ml) and can confirm it's definitely in the 5% range for ABV.

has anyone experienced fermentation like this in a bottle? is my gravity reading totally off because of the carbonation in the beer?

honestly, the beer tasted pretty good, just a little flat. I'm gonna leave it another week and try another bottle, hopefully it's a bit more carbonated but i'm gonna call this a win for my first batch either way haha.

Thanks!

Josh

[wcturnedec]

Hey All,

I'm totally new at this, and for my first batch, i forgot to stop the temperature fluctuation in my house (19 degrees during the day and down to 16 at night) on my auto thermometer, and i think it messed up my fermentation, as my OG was 1.065 and my FG was 1.045 ish. Like an idiot (looked up stuff afterwards, hindsight 20/20), i still bottled this beer knowing that the FG was super high and it likely didn't have a lot of alcohol in it, but whatever - it was my first batch and i'm gonna see it through.

After how many days did you take a FG reading? 1.045 seems awful unless you had a stalled ferment.

Do you remember the temperature of your FG sample?

i bottled a week ago and just took a gravity reading for shiggles and:

a) my bottle wasn't a bomb and didn't explode - yay!
b) it wasn't nearly as sweet as when it went in
c) my gravity reading and it was 1.01

So you took at gravity reading from a bottle? Hard to believe you didn't have insane bottle bombs going from 1.045 to 1.010 in the bottle, that would equate to around 17.5 volumes of CO2 (most beer is between 2.3-2.8 vol CO2).

[KB1138]

First, temps swings from 16 to 19 degrees won't bother the beer at all. That's right in the ball for what you want anyway.
Second, how did you measure a FG of 1.045? And how did you measure a second reading from the bottle of 1.010? A drop of 35 points is enough to cause bottles to explode, there should be no way that the beer is coming out a little flat. I'm going to guess you had some kind of misread on the 1.045 FG.

RDWHAHB. If the beer tastes good now, wait another week for the carb to build up and enjoy.

[ConanTroutman]

If you do run into this issue again, definitely don't bottle at 1.045 unless you're trying to make IEDS

[jlittlechilds]

i took my FG reading after 2 weeks. i dunno, something must have been up with my hydrometer or i fucked up my first FG reading or something...cause yeah, it doesn't seem to make sense really that the bottles didn't disintegrate when i picked them up haha.

i definitely learned my lesson this time!

thanks all