It seems every time I brew a beer with some sort of fruit and/or sugar in the secondary it's way over carbonated. I just brewed a beer with vanilla beans and brown sugar and it's like champagne. It's so over carbonated I just dumped it out. Some other brews I did with strawberries in the secondary was over carbonated but not as bad as his one. Should I cut the priming sugar in half when bottling? Please help me out. Cheers.
How long do you wait after adding the fruit/sugar/etc. before you bottle? The yeast will continue to chew on any fermentable sugars until they're gone, producing CO2 in the process. You need to let it finish before priming and bottling, or it's just a crap shoot.
Also how much priming sugar are you adding? The 5 oz prepackaged sugar you get from LHBS is too much for most beer styles. Best to use a carbonation calculator online. http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator/ http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html http://www.brewersfriend.com/beer-priming-calculator/
Adding onto this, the volume of beer is very important too. Too little volume without changing the amount of priming sugar will put you on your way to overcarbonation as well.
One problem I had with priming and bottling was that I often didn't have 5 gal. of beer to "re-ferment" so, using the (I think it was something like 3."whatever"oz. sugar dissolved in a cup or two of water) calculator didn't work well until I calculated the volume that I was working with. How much time do you let the fruit sit in the beer?
What mikehartigan said. If your fruited/sugared beers have consistently more carbonation than the non-fruited/sugared beers, with the same amount of priming sugar into the same volume of beer, then attenuation was not finished when you bottled.
Thank you guys I appreciate the help. I let it sit for 16 days last time. My Imperial stout turned out AMAZING and I let that sit for 59 days.
