Can an infection hinder bottle conditioning?

Green apple :
From John Palmer's online version of How To Brew

Acetaldehyde
A flavor of green apples or freshly cut pumpkin; it is an intermediate compound in the formation of alcohol. Some yeast strains produce more than others, but generally it's presence indicates that the beer is too young and needs more time to condition.

According to Brew Chem 101 by Lee W. Janson

Acetaldehyde can be avoided by:

Using good quality yeast, especially when brewing high-alcohol beer styles

Allow beer to ferment and age for the proper amount of time

Eliminate bacterial infections by maintaining sterile brewing techniques

The book explains that acetylaldehyde is made during fermentation, then processed into ethanol. If the yeast is too weak for the style of beer being made, it can fail to complete the conversion.

You can also flood acetylaldehyde into beer by adding too much of an adjunct sugar (like table sugar, etc.) People making Trippels and other Belgian styles can run into this if they are not careful.

~~~

Good thing I Googled it. I didn't think that it could be sanitation.

And you might have two issues, erratic carbonation can be from not incorporating the sugars well enough into the bottling bucket. You can always put the sugar/boiled water mix in first. When I did the bottle bucket thing I'd weigh the carboy to see how much wort (or is it beer now?), but after a while I would just eye ball it.

 

That seems like alot of uneccesary work, didn't your bottling bucket have volume markings on the side?

 

That wasn't that hard. The hard part was matching the significant figures of the bigger scale to the smaller one for sugar.

 

Yes, but if you do it right, not significantly. Keep the water addition to a minimum. You're only looking at disolving 3 or 4 oz of sugar. Add an IBU and a gravity unit to the beginning product and call yourself even. Or, if you're me, you don't care that your beer came out finishing 1.010 instead of 1.011.

I've done both ways, batch priming and bottle priming. Bottle priming seems inconsistent and a little more likely to infect. I tend to only bottle a 6 pack from the top of the fermenter. When I bottle more I use a bottling bucket every time.

 

Adding sugar to the bottles is a ‘recipe’ for inconsistency. The optimum way to add priming sugar is to boil the amount of sugar desired (e.g., 4 ounces by weight of corn sugar) in a cup of water, place the sugar solution in the bottom of the bottling bucket and siphon the beer into the bottling buckets. After the beer is transferred you really should also slowly (but conscientiously) stir the beer to ensure complete mixture of the sugar.

You can continue your process of adding sugar directly to the bottles. Sometimes it will work just fine and then other times you will have inconsistent carbonation.

Cheers!

 

"Can an infection hinder bottle conditioning?"

If by hinder you mean gusher or grenade, then yes indeed.

Acetaldehyde is usually present early on and likely would have been present in even the first ones you mentioned.