I made a “big beer”, one with a high alcohol content and was wondering what kind of head I should expect? It’s taken a long time to carb up and may not be through at that, but the head is weak and gone in a hurry. Is this normal for big beers?
Head retention/formation is dependent on the recipe. Not the “size” of the beer.
If you don’t have carbonation, it will be hard to have a head. You may have hit the alcohol tolerance for the yeast and it’s having trouble chewing up the last of the sugar.
Recipe, yeast, time in the fermenter, time in the bottle?
[quote=“Nighthawk”]Head retention/formation is dependent on the recipe. Not the “size” of the beer.
If you don’t have carbonation, it will be hard to have a head. You may have hit the alcohol tolerance for the yeast and it’s having trouble chewing up the last of the sugar.
Recipe, yeast, time in the fermenter, time in the bottle?[/quote]
What he said.
If you add a bunch more extract to the recipe, expect to add more yeast in order to handle your sugars.
Also, I’ll ask this to you since a friend of mine had this problem on one of his first bottled batches:
Did you clean your bottles before bottling by running them in the dishwasher? If you did this (and your dishwasher uses a rinse-aid), that will about kill the head on you. I’m not sure how, but I know there’s something in the rinse-aid that leaves a coating on the glass.
If you didn’t do that… well… ignore it! 
Cheers!
