I am a new homebrewer, and I am at a loss on what went wrong with my second brewing attempt.
I originally purchased a morebeer.com deluxe brewing kit that came with an American ale kit. That first brew went fine. The boil went fine. The original gravity and final gravity readings were both in the expected range. It fermented in a primary fermenter for two weeks, then bottle conditioned for two weeks, and looked and tasted as expected. It had a little more sediment than I expected, but I attributed that to only using a primary fermenter for the process.
The second brew has not gone like I would have expected. It was a Brewers Best Grapefruit IPA kit purchased from a local brewing supply. This recipe called for dry hopping for the final 5-6 days, and I purchased a secondary fermenter in an attempt to get a clearer beer.
The boil was uneventful. I boiled three gallons of wort for an hour, used a wort chiller to bring the temperature down, then added the wort and two gallons of refrigerated water to the fermenter (a 6 gallon Fermonster). The temp at that point was 66 degrees. Here’s where things went a little off course. The recipe said the original gravity should be 1.054-1.056. My reading was just a little under 1.050. I was furiously researching how to increase the OG, saw a formula on how much table sugar to add, and I actually added about a half cup of sugar before deciding that I absolutely had no idea what I was doing, and I decided to just let it ride. I pitched the yeast (I used a White Labs WLP001 instead of the delivered dry yeast) and sealed it up with the airlock. Within 24 hours, I had a healthy churn in the wort and the airlock was bubbling nicely. Room temperature during the fermentation process was 68-70 degrees.
At 7 days, the airlock was bubbling about once every 45 seconds, and the sediment had mostly settled. I transferred the liquid to the secondary fermenter (another 6 gallon Fermonster), added two ounces of hops pellets for the dry hop, and sealed it up with an airlock.
At 13 days, I took a gravity reading, and it was down to 1.003. The expected final gravity was 1.010. I couldn’t find any definitive postings that I was ruined. I tested again at day 14, and it was 1.002. I got 1.002 again on day 15, so I went to bottling. I boiled 5 ounces of priming sugar in two cups of water, cooled it, then added that and the grapefruit extract to the bottling bucket, followed by the beer from the fermenter. Bottling was uneventful, and I filled 23 22-ounce bombers. I stored the bottles at around 68 degrees.
After 14 days of bottle conditioning, I put three bottles in the fridge. Once they were cold, I opened one bottle. There wasn’t a sound of air escaping when I uncapped it, and there was zero carbonation in the beer. It tasted fine, but was absolutely flat. I didn’t open any additional bottles, just put the two remaining in the fridge back into storage. It’s possible I just had a bad seal on that bottle, but there was nothing evident about that.
Now, I’m giving it more time for carbonation to happen, but I don’t know if it’s futile. My original gravity was a little low and my final gravity was WAY low. Was that my problem? Did that decimate the yeast so that it couldn’t carbonate? I look forward to feedback, and am hoping that time will fix this.