A couple weeks ago I saw a post on here talking about a guy who bottled his beer at 70 and it was slow to carbonate. I keg my beer but I carbonate at around 40 f. I always thought cold temps were the best to carbonate at, but people responding to the post were saying to carbonate at 75-80 F. Any suggestions on how best to decide what temp to carbonate at. I have a holiday ale I want to bottle in a couple days and I haven’t bottled in 7 or so years so I want to know the best way to do this.
Priming and force-carbing are entirely different - with priming, you need to keep the beer at a temp where the yeast are active and happy so they’ll eat up the sugar and produce CO2 but with force-carbing you can do it at any temp, although cold beer will more easily absorb the CO2 so you can do it at lower pressure. So if you’re bottling, you want to keep the bottles in the 70-85F range to encourage carbonation in a short time period, or you can go colder, into the 60s or even the 50s, but it will take a lot longer.
+1. I always try to keep the newly primed bottles at the same place/temp that the carboy was when the yeast fermented (the basement). This happens to be around 68 degrees…and never had any problems carbonating at this temp.
well I guess that brings up another question now that I have learned a little science in all this. My Holiday ale has been in the primary three weeks today, I plan on bottling tomorrow. With all the settling that has takin place should I be worried about remaining yeast levels in the beer?
if you only brewed three weeks ago, you should be fine.
It doesn’t hurt to add $1 worth of fresh, dry yeast (rehydrated in warm water) to the bottling bucket to ensure prompt and proper carbonation. Do you need to add it? Probably not, but the time will come when you have a batch that just won’t carb because there wasn’t enough yeast left in suspension and it is a huge PITA to deal with it (plus your beer is just sitting there, flat and warm, and you know you’re going to have to wait at least another two weeks to drink it), so I got in the habit of always adding yeast to every bottle and never had another non-carbed batch.
Little bit of a thread hijack…Can you store opened packets of dry yeast? I used some US-05 when bottling an imp stout that had been conditioning for 4 months or so and have the opened pack in a baggie in the fridge…
