It was an interesting educational experience today. I had bottled some stout that I had recently brewed because I had the time, and there hadn't been any apparent activity in the fermenter for a few days. I normally sample the beer at various points of conditioning to see how carbonated it is, etc.. and just 2 days after bottling it was fully carbonated. Obviously the beer was going to get way too carbonated for safety, so I put all the beers in the fridge to halt fermentation until I figured out what to do next, (and as I mentioned before, I was nervous about bottles blowing up and leaving a black mess and glass shrapnel in the closet. So I asked Callie if I could borrow her welding helmet and leather gloves so that I could open the bottles without risking putting glass in my body. The fridge did a great job of halting fermentation. If anything, the bottles seemed less pressurized than before. The swing-tops that I left in the closet were dangerously pressurized after just a couple days though and they seemed like they were really on the brink of exploding. But it was as easy as popping the tops a few times to vent the pressure. Just so you know, the reason the beer tricked me into thinking it was ready to be bottled was that though there was still a lot of fermentable sugars left in the beer, the oxygen had been completely attenuated, so the yeast growth had simply slowed down to one 20th or so of what it had been. But it was still going, just very slowly. The reason that the oxygen was depleted so soon compared to the sugars this time was because it was such a malty beer (I added 4 pounds on top of the normal 5 pounds of amber liquid malt that would normally make an amber ale similar to a Shiner Bock).
What did we learn? Let your beer have lots and lots of time in the fermenter even if it seems like the activity stopped, especially if it's a big one.
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