Hey everyone! Hope everyone is enjoying the arrival of spring! Quick question…I recently brewed the northern brewer smashing pumpkin…I bottled it using the fizz drops on March 23rd…tonight (April 11th) I cracked my first one…and although the taste was good it was pretty undercarbonated…needless to say I will be sticking to the priming sugar packs from now on haha but is there anything I can do to up the carbonation at this point or am I doomed to enjoy a semi-flat batch of beer??
Quick question how warm are you storing your beer to carb. You could be storing it in too cool of a place and is taken longer to carb.
I am storing it in my extra bedroom it stays 65-70 in there
That should be warm enough. Their are may reasons a beer is under carbed. 1 not enough primer another high abv and inviable yeast. Not knowing the exact cause makes it diffcult to fix. you could pop all cap and add more priming sugar but if its the yeast then that wont help. I have heard and read that some people adding new yeast to bottle but i will let some one thats done it tell ya how.
Give it another week. Time will tell.
+1, impatience is the cause of a lot of beer problems. Just give the beer the time it needs and often the problems resolve themselves. And there is nothing worse than applying a fix that wasn’t needed, as it causes additional problems.
If after a week the beer is still undercarbed, you can try popping the caps and adding an additional carbination tab. Careful though, the tabs will act as nucleation sites and could cause the beer to foam up if you don’t put a new cap on quickly enough.
+1 to giving it another week. But if that doesn’t do it, here’s an idea. I had this happen with a batch of Caribou Slobber.
Try to determine how much carbonation is in the beer. If you were shooting for, say, 2.6 vols, and it seems about a half of the way there, call it 1.3. So then you would need about another 1.3 vols to make up the difference. Using a priming calculator, figure out how much sugar you would need for 1.3 vols in the total amount of beer that you have. Divide that amont by the number of bottles you have, now you have a “per bottle” amount of sugar. Boil enough sugar for two bottles in a small amount of water. Cool it, divide it, pop the top on two bottles, add to bottle, recap, and keep it room temp for a week or two. Rousing the bottle a little will help too. If they carb up, you know your yeast is good and you can do the rest of the batch. If they don’t, then reyeasting a bottle with a tiny sprinkle of dry yeast would be my next try. The repriming worked for me, though. Mine carbed up in about a week and a half.
And if I’m correct, the OG on this kit is around 1.054, so I don’t think alcohol level would be a problem.
Also, RBC is right. If you use the tabs again, or dry sugar, you stand to lose a lot of beer to foaming because of the nucleation. That’s why I boiled the sugar first. No foaming at all.
Best of luck,
Ron
Thanks for all the help guys! I will try just letting it sit another week then I will turn to alternative methods perhaps haha…I am just not patient enough sometimes because I want to drink my beer dammit! haha
