Racked the Red Storm this evening. This is going to be some scary, experimental stuff. It started off with a gravity of 1.12. That’s freakishly high. It’s fermented down to around 1.06, which means it’s nowhere NEAR complete. I may need to rack it again at this rate. Anyway, even though we’re at the edge of alcohol levels where the standard approximations don’t apply anymore, [(difference in gravities) * 129 = your alcohol by volume] indicates that this brew is ALREADY weighing in at 7.74%. Bud is around 5. Most microbrews clock in between 6 and 7. This batch … well … it’s going to have to age a very long time. If it eats the other half of that sugar, it’ll be in the 14% range … which is high for WINE. Even the mighty Sam Adams triple bock only managed 17%.
The neat part is that my 4oz of hops seem (based on the mandatory sample, for quality control) to have produced that “balanced” character that brewers talk about to impress each other. Yay!
I had two hypotheses about why fermentation stopped already (having consumed only about half of the available sugar. One was that the yeast ran out of oxygen. Another was that the amazingly high amounts of sugar may have actually acted as a bit of a preservative. Not sure what to do to re-kick start it without introducing all sorts of badness.
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