Help bottling my first sour

RDWHAHB

I'm new to sours myself. If you need to you can pitch half a satchel of US 05 into the fermenter to get you cell count up. I believe that the bugs have a longer shelf life in the fermenter than sac. yeast. When you transfer over to a bottling bucket you can suck up a little bit of the trub to get your count up as well. I'm sure others will chime in with their bottling experiences.

Rinse everything with 1:10 bleach and then water water water before you go back to a sac. strain.

 

A little bit of oxygen during bottling isn't going to make or break you, just make sure to grab some fresh yeast or bugs to add during bottling to make sure you get a secondary fermentation for carbing up bottles. In the future, get a keg, prime the keg with CO2, force carb the beer, then bottle using a bottling gun. Problem solved.

 

Correct, try to rack into your bottling bucket as gently as possible to minimize oxygen u take. But the secondary fermentation during the bottling phase will convert some of that O2 anyways.

 

Oxygen's part of the game. No sloshing.

 

Kudos for not opening the fermentor at all during the aging process! Brett is an oxygen scavenger so no need to worry about the o2 pickup in the bottling process. I would bottle normally, but add a few grams of champagne yeast to ensure quick carbonation. However, consider that any cold side plastic equipment used during bottling may forever harbor bugs. I keep a separate set of sour/funky bottling equipment. Cheers!

 

Before bottling I would open up the fermentor and take a gravity reading. You need to make sure that the beer's gravity is stable and is ready to bottle first off. Tasting at this point is not a bad idea also.

 

4oz of sugar is probably not enough. If the beer is 6+ months old, there isn't a lot of co2 left in the beer. Priming calculators assume there will be co2 left in the beer. Roughly 0.8 volumes. You may have some co2 left in the beer, but probably not 0.8 volumes.

http://www.brewersfriend.com/beer-priming-calculator/

 

From my sour experiments, I've noticed that it helps to under-fill when bottling.

...It could just be the yeast I work with, but in the past when I filled to the usual mid-neck on a bomber -- it transformed to a geyser! Yikes

Good Luck!

 

That means you bottled before it was finished fermenting and / or you used too much priming sugar. Sours get a regular bottle fill.

 

How old is this beer? How fast do you want it to carbonate? What are the OG and FG? Did you add any fruit? If so, when? Did you use dregs? If so, from which beer(s)?

 

If you have strong sour bugs in there to make a Tart of Darkness clone, then I wouldn't worry too much about re-yeasting. I would prime to your desired level using a calculator like Brew_Betty mentioned. My 3-year-old straight lambic was carbonated in less than 2 weeks when I bottled this past summer.

 

As @LakesideBrewing said above, a stable final gravity is important, or you'll be risking bottle bombs. After a year in the carboy, it may very well be done attenuating, but I would suggest getting a gravity reading, giving it some more time (at least a month and preferably longer) and checking it again before you bottle.