Why did my first 2 batches fail

Souring in the bottles can be from sanitation. Could be your bottling bucket, could be your hoses. Probably your bottles, however.

As for carbing.. It's a crapshoot to guess without really knowing what all you did. I'll have to ask, where did you store the bottles while attempting to carbonate them? Did you store them warm, around 70 or so for a couple of weeks, and then put them into the fridge for a couple of days?

When you opened any of them, did you manage to get a hiss from anything? Your bottle caps were on tight, and you didn't use twist off bottles, correct?

I'd suggest for the future batches to use a priming calculator, and doing so based on your volume you have. In most cases, extract brewers and new brewers tend to not pay attention to volumes, and thats where you go wrong.

Also- skip a secondary. You could be dropping out too much yeast and giving yourself trouble carbonating. That said- I haven't bottle conditioned in years, so I can't really offer any other tweaks to the process. Kegging is simply easier.

 

Have you read any books about homebrewing?

http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html or buy the print version which many of us have.

Never follow the instructions that come with the kit, just look at the recipe to make sure its all there and that you know the hop addition times. The rest of the process they tell you in those included instructions are mostly garbage. Concentrate especially on yeast pitching rates and fermentation temperature control.

Edit: The yeast are not on a strict time schedule (1 week for this, 2 weeks for that, etc.), make sure your beer reaches final gravity before doing anything to it.

 

Read how to brew.

Bottles: immediately rinse with HOT water after pouring into a glass. Dry completely upside-down. When TOTALLY dry, cap with a square of tinfoil until it's time to sanitize them. If there's ANY even minute speck of dirt inside bottle, recycle it and get another bottle.

Fermentation temperature control. Get it. Nothing higher than ambient air 69F, 64F preferred for standard ale yeast. The fermenting beer will get perhaps as much as ten degrees higher than ambient air temperatures, and ales prefer below 70F WORT temperature (general rule). Many of us use a freezer with a controller setup for fermentation temperature control. Probably best to work towards this goal quickly, especially if you live in the south or southwest where's is blaring hot most of the year. You can't keep your AC low enough.

Chill wort quickly. As in get a wort chiller. Use it. You might need a pre-chiller if your tapwater is well above 70F, as mine is for about 3/4 of the year.

Standard ale yeast - try S-04 or US-05 or Nottingham. Use one of those yeasts for your next batch, they're super reliable, tasty, and come in dry form. S-04 is more "English": and the other two are quite clean. Rehydrate according to manufacturer's directions.

Yeast pitching temperature. Below 70F, again 64F is preferable.

Sanitation. Get starsan and don't fear the foam.

After you aerate and pitch yeast, seal bucket and don't open for any reason whatsoever for at least two weeks. No reason you can't leave it in there a month. Also no reason to do secondary. Those are for fruit, or for beers requiring extended aging beyond about 6 weeks in primary (general rule, just go with it)

Get a gram scale for measuring your priming sugar. 28 grams per gallon is about the upper limit (equivalent to 5oz priming sugar for 5 gallons). Suggest a bit less than that, perhaps 24 grams per gallon. Try to get it pretty close (but it doesn't have to be down to the milligram, just get it fairly close). Adding priming sugar to the bottling bucket or carboy first is good. Make sure you get a good swirl when siphoning. Give it a little stir too, but don't aerate it at this point. Get an auto-siphon if you don't have one already. Sanitize siphoning equipment well and rinse very well and get it dry afterwords. I swing the tubing around to get the excess rinse water out by centripetal force.

KISS methodology. Complicated = bad, simple = good. Extract plus hops can make exceptionally tasty beer. Did a wheat beer using only wheat extract and 2 oz hops that came out splendid. Russian imperial stouts are lousy noob brews. Simple pale ales and IPAs are good.

Get a procedure before you start, a detailed one that spells out every step (and the logic for it). Use my early blogs as examples if you need a template, but adjust for YOUR SETUP AND RECIPES, not mine.

Try a nice pale ale with plenty of hops, an IPA, or maybe a brown ale. Hops cover flaws. They don't completely cover up lousy beer tho. But if you do everything in this thread so far your flaws should be minor at best (and thus hops would cover them up nicely till you reach a state of perfection, which only comes with practice).

Use campden, 1/2 a tablet for 5 gallons of water if your locality uses chloramine, or if you're not sure (many municipalities do use chloramine at some point in the year, but they won't tell you unless you ask, and you may need to ask the right person to get a clear answer). This prevents band-aid flavors.

Rigorous boil, full boil. Turkey fryers are great for brewing (just don't try to fry turkeys in them, and don't fry a turkey one day then brew the next!). If you can't get a turkey fryer, make sure you somehow get a full boil going, even if you need to split the wort into more than one pot (if you have a glass top stove, you virtually MUST do it this way to get a five gallon batch). Split hops proportionately to the boil volumes (close enough is good enough). Full boil >>>>>> partial boil + added water.

Search and read every noob thread on this forum.

 

The thing that jumps out at me is the 90F pitch temp for that first batch. That alone will ruin a batch of beer, even if you did everything else right.

One of the most important things to understand about brewing is, as the saying goes, brewers make wort but yeast makes beer. To brew quality beer, you have to pitch the right amount of yeast at the right temperature, and ideally you need to be able to control the fermentation temperature as well. If you can't do these things, the yeast will produce off flavors, at the very least, and they may also fail to completely ferment the beer and/or carbonate it.

There's a lot of material out there on how to know you're pitching the right amount of yeast and how to control the temperature. Read up till you feel like you have handle on it, and give it another go. Brewing's fairly easy, but you do have to be exact about certain things, especially when it comes to yeast management.

 

oh sorry obviously you boil your priming sugar in a little water, enough to kill any bacteria in there (but don't carmelize it) then let it cool, then add it to your bottling carboy/bucket, then rack on top of that, then give a gentle swirl. just had to clarify just in case.

 

What yeast did you use? Any yeast starter? And did you add more yeast at bottling?

 

When there's little or no carbonation after a long time (a year in your case), there's really only 4 possibilities...

- Not enough priming sugar in the bottles you opened (due to not using enough sugar or uneven mixing)
- Not enough viable yeast left to do the job (due to severe underpitching, or too high an alcohol content for the yeast strain, or other major cause of stress)
- Temperatures too cold for the yeast to be active
- Leaky packaging allowing CO2 to escape

Are the bottles you opened all from the same part of your bottling run? (Could point to uneven mixing, even if you had no actual bottle bombs in the others.)

I doubt that pitching at 90F caused your non-carbonation problem. Well, maybe, if your yeast were damn near freezing, then dropped into 90F wort. But otherwise the yeast would love 90F. (Though the beer wouldn't, flavorwise.)

Anyway, it has to be one of those four things, even if you're "sure" none of them apply.

 

Wait, you forgot a few...

• aliens
• gremlins
• da gubmint
• quantum mechanics

some things you can never rule out

 

I'd bet not enough viable yeast left. If you didn't pitch a healthy yeast starter initially or supplement your priming sugar with more healthy yeast at bottling, your yeast troops probably were worn out and told bottle conditioning to fuck off.

 

One size don't fit all.
Insufficient priming sugar is the most likely cause for OP's Batch_2 not carbing properly.

Calculating the amount of priming sugar (corn...table...DME) needed to produce the desired CO2 volume must also take the beer's temperature into consideration.

 

Before I get into what could be wrong I must admit that I only half read what people before me had wrote = too little time and too many beers tonight...

1st batch

90F pitch = huge mistake and you should be glad the batch never carbed or you would have had to actually drink that beer

2nd batch

Mistake #1 - you chose to do a DIPA for your second batch (too much $ and too high a gravity for a beginner)

Bottle carb issue, the one thing that popped into my head was that you somehow got mislabeled sugar packs. You might have gotten something else, and while this is only a slight off chance, if you were given lactose instead of dextrose (which look fairly similar) you could easily explain your carbing issue. I wouldn't put it past a LHBS employee to do something like this. In the past Ive walked in and asked for 12# of pils to do a pilsner and was handed 12# of carapils (palm to face.....) In the future instead of spending the $ on dextrose from a LHBS, just use some table sugar, and then you can eliminate this extremely minute chance of getting the wrong stuff.


If you want to be successful this time around get light dry extract, brew up something hoppy, keep your pitch temp cool (mid 60's), ferment coolish (mid-high 60s), and use table sugar to carbonate. In fact here's a couple easy recipes in case your interested

Simple Pale

5# Light DME
0.25# sugar

1oz citra 60min
1oz citra 0min

Wy 1056 or 1968
3gal boil (full if possible)


Wile E Wheaty

5# Wheat DME

1oz hallertau 60min

Wy3333 or 3068
3gal boil (full if possible)