Question guys. I recently racked my caribou slobber over to secondary to clean it up. During this process I added a tablespoon of biofine to my 5 gallon batch to clear it up. I plan on bottling this. Did I make a mistake by adding this if I am bottling it? Did all my yeast settle and now it won’t carbonate?
You can always add a little dry yeast in the bottling bucket to be on the safe side. I’ve done that after long cold crashes. May not be necessary, but it won’t hurt anything. A couple of grams/5 gall should work.
My fermentation temp has been right at 62 degrees so it has stayed fairly cool. Do you think there is enough yeast still in suspension for it to carb properly? It ha only been in secondary about 7 days and that is when I added the biofine.
I think Bio-fine is isinglass. It binds to yeast due to having an opposite charge, causing the yeast to clump and fall out. If it works well enough, your beer may not carb. You can either take a chance and bottle anyway, in which case you risk having a batch of flat beer with no good way to fix it, proof it, or re-yeast, as I suggested. For proofing, you want to take a sample out, prime it with some sugar, warm it up and see if it krausens. If so, your yeast is good and you can proceed. If it doesn’t you’ll need to add some yeast at priming. Or, you can go ahead and add some yeast at bottling. The amount you add won’t affect the beer noticicably, but if you’re worried about that than go the proofing route. If you do, you don’t need to use much. Get it good and warm so that it will ferment quickly. If it hasn’t taken off in 24 hours, re-yeast with about 10% as much yeast as you fermented with. You can always use a neutral dry yeast, like Notty or US-05, regardless of the original variety.
Sounds good. Thanks for your help!
Wondering if you could apply Nighthawks recommendation of using a soda bottle, and squeezing the air out, and screwing the cap on (with some added sugar), as a check to see if your yeasties are still happy enough to bottle ferment, and thus recarb and expand the soda bottle.
I think this is usually done an as adjunct during normal bottling, but seems if you have good sterile technique you could do it earlier with a bottles worth to check.
This is with the caveat, I’m also new to brewing but wanted to share the thought.
[quote=“DrBrews”]Wondering if you could apply Nighthawks recommendation of using a soda bottle, and squeezing the air out, and screwing the cap on (with some added sugar), as a check to see if your yeasties are still happy enough to bottle ferment, and thus recarb and expand the soda bottle.
I think this is usually done an as adjunct during normal bottling, but seems if you have good sterile technique you could do it earlier with a bottles worth to check.
This is with the caveat, I’m also new to brewing but wanted to share the thought.[/quote]
You could use a soda bottle, but the point of that technique is to let you know when bottle conditioning is finished. In this case you just want to see if the yeast is still viable, so it doesn’t matter what kind of container you use, just make sure it’s closed so ambient yeast doesn’t get in.
Did you use Biofine or Biofine Clear? Two different products. The latter is the product I see most commonly on the major HBS websites. I’ve used Biofine Clear prior to bottle conditioning without any carbonation problems.
I remember worrying about this when I used gelatin when I first started brewing. It’s a classic question. You should be fine.
