Sugar wash - stalled at 0.994?

[NZPete]

Hi guys,

I'm currently doing my first sugar wash. 55L wash, started at 1.064. I used EC1118 and Fermaid AT nutrients with a handful of crushed oyster shells.

Wash seems to have stopped at 0.994. Obviously that's theoretically pretty much finished but from everything I've read it should have finished 0.990. Added to that, I had a sip (I know, I'm rough lol) and it still tasted a little bit sweet.

Should I try to get it going again by faffin about with pH and re-pitching yeast or should I just run it?

[Oatmeal]

Let it be a bit or run it, no reason to do anything else.

[TwoSheds]

If you can test your pH you'll probably have your answer on that.

Airlock? Bubbling?

Are you adding any external heat? Wrapped in blankets? What temp are you fermenting at?

Without external heat as the yeast starts to slow down it doesn't have enough of its own heat to stay in the happy zone. If the temp drops into the 60s or lower things will get very, very slow.

Just some thoughts. Hope that helps.

[Yummyrum]

Pete , its done and dusted .
Seriously .
I’m buggered if I know what sweetness you are tasting at that reading .
I generally can’t detect much sweetness below around 1.005 on a sugar wash .

A lot of sugar washes , such as Teds , Friggn fast Vodka and the likes that have cereal n them won’t get as low as 0.990 because they have “other” stuff in there that skews the Gravity in much the same way as Molasses will make a fully fermented Rum wash read 1.060 when its done .


If in doubt , leave it another week . If nothing else , it will settle clear .

[Chucker]

Check on, but don’t get too hung up on the minutia of the small numbers. If it’s quit working (not just the airlock) and has settled, it’s done. If you check it over the course of a few days and the gravity doesn’t change, it’s done. Just run it and move on to the next.
The hydrometer could be off a bit, the temperature correction factor could be creating a small error, small amounts of unfermented residuals, methodology; there are a host of things that could lead to readings that look to be incomplete. You could expend a fair bit of time, energy, and frustration in trying to wring out very little in potential yield. If it looks and acts like its done then it probably is.
If you think that you may have erred in your method then just fix it in the next one. You aren’t trying to recover a batch of wine that will be ruined if you do nothing. What you have is perfectly runnable and the end result will be the same whether it was .998 or .990.

[NZPete]

Gave it another day, seems to be down around 0.992 so I'm going to throw it in the fridge and get it ready to run!

[bluefish_dist]

Anything below 1.0 and tasting tart is ready to go. Don’t sweat the last little bit.