Excessive foaming in bottle conditioned hoppy ales.

Three things (or a combination of them) that I immediately think about:

1. is the taste excessively tart on the tongue such that you have an infected beer?
2. was the beer finished with fermentation, i.e. at the expected final gravity?
3. could you have added too much priming sugar?

 

1) You bottled too soon.
2) You used too much priming sugar
3) You are infected.

period

 

What can I do to reduce excessive foaming in bottle conditioned hoppy beers?

Not a difficult fix . . . just re-cap your bottles. Maybe a little trail and error on the first couple to see how much gas to let escape.

 

Jae is probably right with his one of three things. Here's a fourth possibility: are there particulates in the beer (e.g., hop floaters), which will encourage foam?

There may not be a solution. Here's something to try: Get a bottle and serving glass cold, close to freezing, and get your glasses to the same temp. This should help more CO2 stay in solution when you pour. Didn't help enough? Try the quick de-cap-recap technique to let some CO2 out. Combining this with freezer temps may be helpful. Disclaimer: I've never done any of this; it's just a bunch of crap I read on the internet.

 

The OP posted: “My beers didn't get excessively foamy until 3 months in or so though…”

If he used too much priming sugar or bottled too soon I would have expected foaming from the ‘get go’ vs, 3 months after bottling.

Why the beer would experience excess foaming after 3 months of bottling is a mystery to me.

Cheers!

 

This is always just a little bit painful when this happens, as bottle priming is the last step following a lot of work leading up to it. You may never know what happened to the previous batches, but be very careful with ensuring that full attenuation has occurred before bottling, and be equally careful as to the amount of priming sugar you use going forward, and try again. I have had over-primed, under-primed, and beer that simply failed to carbonate, and each case was a big let-down.

Good luck, you will nail it next time!

 

In my experience, delays like this are symptomatic of bottle infections. I have had bottle infections that do not turn sour, in which the beer loses its taste and body.

 

When you use a lot of hops the hops can end up absorbing some of the wort, leading to a lower than expected volume. Lower than expected volume might lead to you over priming because you use the proper amount for a larger batch(if you used a pre measured sugar packet, etc) Did you dry hop? If you dry hopped, you could get more absorption still. Also, depending on whether or not you filtered the hop particles out, you may have more nucleation sites from the hop particles in the bottle.

 

Basically, these are you potential causes. The good news is, they are all relatively easy to control.

I have no idea why a bottle conditioned beer would be excessively foamy months after bottling (and apparently, not before?). It's true that higher gravity/ABV beers tend to take longer to carbonate, so it's possible that if this was a big beer (or maybe was stored at a relatively cool temperature) then your problem was #1 and/or #2 and it just took that long for the yeast to ferment the extra sugars.

 

I suppose that a kind of a variation of using too much priming sugar is that the sugar may not have been well distributed so that only some bottles are over-carbonated and others are under-carbonated, but the OP has only tried bottles so far that were properly primed.

 

time to build a kegerator!

 

I believe that hop debris in the bottles contributes to excessive foaming. My current batch, an APA fermented with Conan yeast, has lots of hop debris in the bottles. I dry hopped with 3 ounces of pellets added direct to the primary. I used a paint strainer over the auto siphon when I racked to the bottling bucket, but still ended up with some really fine green sediment in the bottles. I primed to style based on the Northern Brewer priming calculator and I'm positive my fermentation had completed.

The bottles gush as soon as they are opened. I lose about 1/3 of the bottle into the sink. I suspected hop debris might be contributing and I was really convinced when I opened the last bottle that had been bottled. This bottle had probably twice the debris in it that the other bottles had. I was actually just trying to pry it open a little to try to let some CO2 escape, but the bottle exploded, gushing uncontrollably all over the room, and leaving only a couple ounces from a 26 oz bottle. That little 'experiment' has convinced me that hop debris in the bottles does lead to more CO2 in solution.

 

Its not that you have more CO2 in solution; its that the nucleation sites help push all of the CO2 out of solution, causing excessive foam.

 

Pro-tip for reducing the amount of foam-in-glass...given there's excess foam when decanting:
1) use a wet glass tilted at an oblique angle
2) decant ASAP after popping the cap