German Brewing

This is all caveated that I am using a device as the basis for my gravity readings. I am away from home during the week for work most weeks so it's the best option I have for monitoring my beer while controlling temp with the brewpi. Once home again later this week I will take a normal sample to validate with a traditional hydrometer.

Anyways, with my second LODO batch (Helles) brewed this past Saturday and pitched with a full quart slurry from my first LODO batch (Festbier) I am seeing a full 9 points of attenuation per day (both 3 gallon batches)! This seems extraordinarily high.

While possibly a "good problem"; the issue I'm facing is my beer attenuating so fast it will reach 1.5 P above FG a day or more before my temps reach 5-6 C. Furthermore I'm now expecting it to attenuate below 1.5 P above FG before I can get home to transfer to secondary. These problems no one can solve, so what I'm really wondering is if this observed speed of attenuation is abnormal? Did I just pitch waaaay too much yeast?

I used one of these brewometers for 5 batches and never got any useful gravity information from it. Sometimes being as much as 0.015 off either high or low. I think it's bubbles and other matter that sticks to the casing but either way it's just not accurate enough to try to predict when to spund. Temperature info seemed pretty accurate though.

To be honest.. I'm not sure. I didn't use a graph and while looking at the meter regularly the fluctuations in readings made it almost impossible to decide the correct point to transfer and spund. Each beer was different though and accuracy depended a lot on how much braun hefe was floating and how vigorous the co2 evolution. Your results will most certainly vary from mine. Would have been great if it had worked better but in retrospect I wish I'd spent the money on something else more useful.

1L of slurry is 2-4 trillion cells (2-4 billion per ml). You are going to see the gravity drop very quickly at that rate.

I've always used 1.2 x 10⁹ cells/ml for estimation.

By that guideline 500 ml would contain ~600 x 10⁹ cells.

I was always under the impression that the 2-4 x 10⁹ cells/ml figure assumed pure yeast.