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formented beer has sweet taste

ouldefauder

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I messed up the water quantities I think and the original gravity was low and the final gravity was very high. ABV is 1.9 when planned for 5.0. The brew has a very sweet taste. Fermentation took place between 678 deg to 65 deg. Iodine test shows a golden brown. How can you tell if fermentation was incomplete, is iodine a good way?
 
If OG was low, let's say 1.040 and FG was still high, say 1.020, that would be only 50% attenuation which is pretty poor. 

What were your actual OG and FG?  If it also tastes sweet, then it seems likely it didn't ferment out, and there are countless causes for that.  Tough to advise until you post what you did during this process. 
 
MaltLicker said:
If OG was low, let's say 1.040 and FG was still high, say 1.020, that would be only 50% attenuation which is pretty poor. 

What were your actual OG and FG?  If it also tastes sweet, then it seems likely it didn't ferment out, and there are countless causes for that.  Tough to advise until you post what you did during this process.
1.055 OG 1020 FG. I am just learning how to do all grain. 2nd try and am new to Beersmith. 30+ years ago brewed DME for 10-12 years and volumes plus ABV were always what I expected.
Think I'll dump this batch. I just received a new Igloo cooler and will try to get Beersmith to understand what I am using and how. Full water into the Igloo with grain, then into a 15G kettle for the boil. Sounds easy but Beersmith does not appear to lend itself to easy and the terminology is all new to me. Thanks for your response. I suspect that even with 1L yeast from a stir plate I did not get full fermentation.
 
That is 63% attenuation, which is not horrible for some yeast strains.  Sounds like a good starter was used, so perhaps something else affected a complete fermentation.

 
Adding oxygen greatly increased my conversion rate. Lots of aeration - splashing - helps. Oxygen injection helps more. In fact, I've gotten what I consider to be excessive conversion when I used oxygen injection; some beers have attenuated to the point they lost much of the malty character I wanted. (I'm learning to control that with mash temperatures.)

Yeast selection and fermentation temperature also contribute to the conversion/attenuation/flavor/body equation - lots of moving parts in beer making.
 
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