Attenuation, Is this normal?

[MaltySmoOTH]

So I just bottled some cider that I fermented with Wyeast Belgian Saison 3724. My OG was 1.056, I left it in primary for about a month and my FG was 0.996. I've used wine yeast and had it finish this dry, but I didn't expect this from a beer yeast. I pitched a smack pack into 3 gallons. Wouldn't have this attenuated over 100%? The Wyeast website lists the attenuation for this specific strain @ 76 - 80%, would this be apparent attenuation or actual attenuation?

[spiderwrangler]

I believe those values are based on malt sugars?

[TheDarkSide]

That sounds about right. I use Nottingham in 5 gallons and it gets pretty low as well. If it's too low for your taste, stabilize and backsweeten.

[hoodie]

I use beer yeast for my ciders and they always ferment down to 1.000. Cider must are made up of simpler sugars, much easier for the yeast to consume. It would be harder to make a cider that didn't ferment all the way out. (google keeving)

[MaltySmoOTH]

alright, this makes this sense, thanks for posting.

[NHBrewer]

Not sure with beer yeast but with our wine yeast we can get up to 30 plato of attenuation. Seems perfectly normal to have fully fermented with only 14 plato of very digestible must. If you had wanted it to be sweeter you could have halted the fermentation once you reached the terminal gravity that you desired, or you can preserve the mead, once it had finished on its own, then backsweeten. Each of these will give you slightly different results but either way will leave you with a sweeter mead in the end.

Chris Killinger
Fermentation Specialist
Moonlight Meadery
603-216-2162

[MNHazmat]

I've been using White Labs sweet mead yeast for my ciders with great success. I still end up backsweeting but it's a really clean ferment wothout the odd flavors that I found beer yeasts contributing.