I brewed a double IPA. I really like the taste but it is pretty flat. It didn't carbonate like my other beers have. This is the first time. Is there anything I can do to save close to 50 bottles of good brew?
How long has it been carbonating, at what temp, and how much sugar did you use? And (perhaps skipping ahead a little), how did you mix the priming sugar with the beer?
It fermented a total of about 20 days. It is around 8% ABV. I used the 5 ounces of priming sugar like I always have and poured the solution into the bottom of the bottling bucket before racking the wort. It has been bottled for 3 weeks at around 70 degrees.
Send it to me. I'll put it in a keg, carbonate it, and raise a toast to you every time I hoist a pint!
I'm almost wondering if I'd be able to add a few more drops of the priming sugar solution and re-cap the bottles.
Give it a couple more weeks, maybe rouse the yeast in the bottles a little. Bigger beers usually take more time. There's some chance you would have benefited from a little fresh yeast when bottling, but I don't think that should be absolutely necessary at that ABV and after only 20 days. Make sure when you say "at 70 degrees" that it's really steady at that temp. I had some early batches take a really long time to carbonate when I let them fluctuate with the programmable thermostat in my house. I eventually built a small fermentation / carbonation chamber in the basement that I can heat with a fermwrap and keep steady at 68-70.
You might check another bottle, from the other end of the bottling run, if you can distinguish them. My first guess given that you said would be uneven mixing. Also, 8% is not huge, but it's getting up there...could also just not be done yet.
So here is a question I always have about these threads, and please pardon my ignorance if it is apparent due to this question. I often see the recommendation to add some fresh yeast to beers that have fermented for extended periods of time. However, I find myself wondering whether this is asking for bottle bombs or a secondary fermentation in the bottles. My thinking is as follows. Most yeasts are quoted as attenuating somewhere between 65% to 80% of the available fermentables. Given this, when the yeast is done fermenting, it is not due to all the available fermentable sugars being consumed, but instead because it has reached its maximum attenuation capacity. Might introducing a fresh yeast lead to a secondary fermentation of the remaining 35 to 20% of fermentable sugars (in addition to the priming sugar) that were left in solution after the primary yeast strain crapped out? If not, why? I'm always curious about this and haven't been able to find a reasonable answer/explanation.
As long as the second strain is not a more attenuative strain than the first, and assuming the first strain did what it should have, and did not poop out, there's nothing left (except priming sugar) for the second yeast to ferment. The other stuff that was left over was non-fermentable, at least for these strains.
That sounds like a great point to me. Almost sounds like if you add a little more yeast to a secondary you could ferment 100% of the sugars and make the beer a bit stronger.
Alright, so it sounds like my misunderstanding is that attenuation percentage for each yeast strain is based on the amount of sugar avaible at the beginning of fermentation. It is not relative to the gravity at the time each strain of yeast is introduced. Thanks.
Right, otherwise you could make really high ABV beers by just adding new strains. If that was the case Brew Dog would already be doing it.
