Is it ruined?

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geek_chaser

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My beer was supposed to be 7% abv. Well when it was fermenting my FIL turned the temp WAY down, so my husband turned the space heater on it WAY up. I stirred it lightly and took the gravity at 4%abv on the 8th day. Its sitting in the secondary in a makeshift fermentation chamber (unplugged freezer with a heating mat taped inside hooked up to an inkbird ferment temp controller ). The temp is between 75 to 77 degrees. If i just leave it alone and bottle after 2 weeks is up, is 4% not bad? I know that its not bad, but since it didnt finish fermenting, is it not good?
 
How are you calculating the ABV. If you are using the alcohol numbers on a hydrometer, those are not the ABV of the beer. That is potential for wine making, though I make wine and don't know how you use it... 75 to 77 degrees is pretty warm for most ale yeasts. Unless your air temperature is really cool you should be cooling the beer not warming it. Most ale yeast do best in the mid sixties.

https://www.brewersfriend.com/abv-calculator/

It is probably not ruined. How bad it is depends mostly on how hot it got when the space heater was on it.
 
What was the recipe? If it is an extract recipe, they often stop at 1.020 and are still OK. At 8 days, especially at the high temperatures it could easily be done. Leave it for 2 weeks total then bottle it.
 
I think you may be too high a gravity to bottle, post your recipe (and if all grain your mash temps and whatnot). A 4% beer isn't necessarily bad and neither is one that finishes at 1.020, but man, I've had a bad time when I bottled prior to the beer hit FG. You don't want that.
 
It may not hurt to repurchase the yeast. I don't know how Belgian yeast is, but once English yeast drops from getting too cool I can never get it going again.

Did you hit the 150 mash temp? It seems like you should be able to get below 1.020, although I haven't brewed with extract for a while. How long has it been at 1.020?
 
Looking a the recipe and your numbers, I take it you used liquid malt extract and not dry? If so your starting gravity was within a point or two of expectation for a 5 gallon batch. Your current gravity is really high for what I would expect, though. Even with extract, that yeast should get down to 1.010-1.014 before I considered it done.

You don't want a sweet golden strong taste wise and you don't want bottle bombs because you rushed it. If its in a secondary, I take it that you transferred it off the main yeast cake, so any fermentation, even at the higher temps, is going to be sluggish. I would recommend rousing gently and keeping the temp up. If you don't see any gravity movement, at all, for three days, I would consider pitching an active starter at krausen. If you see even a small drop in gravity I would let it go and let the yeast do its job...slowly. I've tried this with a saison strain and it ended up taking 2 months, but it finally got down to where I wanted the beer to be.

Earlier this year I attempted to clone Spencer's Trappist ale with yeast harvest right from their bottles. The batch stalled out for a month and half at 1.016 when it was supposed to finish closer to 1.004-1.006. My solution was to take the dregs of a brett farmhouse I was drinking (sanitized properly of course) and just pitched the dregs into the secondary. Let me tell you, that beer eventually got down to 1.002 and because I left the brett so much sugar to consume, it really turned out to be a great brett heavy "farmhouse patersbier". Brett isn't everyone's cup of tea, and you have to be careful when brewing clean beers in brett equipment afterwards, but it is an option that, in my opinion, saved an otherwise mediocre to poor batch.
 
I typically hesitate to re-pitch yeast but it is always an option. First, I'd get my temp stabilized and ride it on out 2 weeks - then check your gravity. 1.020 is not the end of the world...you won't have 7% ABV, you may find it a tad sweet and a tad heavy on the mouthfeel...but possibly not, just depends on your tastes.

If you hit 2 weeks and not much has happened, you can always dose it with a half sachet of a neutral dry yeast like US-05 to bring the gravity down and dry it out some. But I'd try the full two weeks as your yeast may kick back into gear when you stabilize the temps.
 

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