Beer not carbed--supposed to serve at wedding!

Hey guys,

A friend asked me to brew a batch of homebrew for his wedding which is tomorrow. It's been in bottles for 3 weeks, cracked one open last night and it's pretty flat. Fortunately its a milk stout so it "kind of" goes with the style-but its definitely flatter than it should be.

Any ideas? Someone mentioned serving it on nitro instead? I'm going to call a couple LHBS' when they open later to see if they have any ideas but I thought I'd check with you guys.

The groom would really like the milk stout-other than being flat it tastes incredible. However I do have a backup batch of IPA that could work.

Carefully transfer to keg and force carb?

Transfering to a keg and force carb then re-bottle is probably the quickest way. If you had more time you could move to a warmer location.

The one that you tried was it placed in a fridge for a few hours? This will help dissolve any co2 in the headspace into the liquid.

If they are bottled you are kind of out of luck to get it more carbed in a day's time. You could take one over to your buddy and see if he would prefer an undercarbonated milk stout or an IPA.

Buy a bunch of commercial milk stouts and get to delabeling and recapping them with homebrew caps. Lay claim they were created by you!

How cold did you serve it at? Raising the temperature (if you refrigerated it before testing) would help.
Or as Hardly said, you could try transferring into a keg and force carbonating slightly. You won't get up to a typical volume of CO2, but you might get closer than you currently are.
Otherwise Nitro with a restrictor/aerator disc would be the only option I see.
The question is: would the groom prefer what you have to nothing? If you try to correct and it goes wrong are you going to be worse off than you are now? I doubt you can kill it in such a short time, but it's something to consider.

Can you pop the bottles, add Prime Dose, recap? I ask because I have an undercarbed quad.

MaddBaggins said:

Can you pop the bottles, add Prime Dose, recap? I ask because I have an undercarbed quad.

Click to expand...

That would work, but not by tomorrow.

I had an undercarbed bottle once so I popped the top and added 2 tabs per bottle (I don't use tabs normally but it
seemed like the easiest way.

If you have means to get into a keg and force carbonate that would work, otherwise I'd take the suggestion of asking your friend if he likes it or would prefer the IPA. No point in ruining the batch just to get it done.

Hey thanks for your help everyone. We decided to go with the IPA. It's too bad I'm not set up to keg because that would have been the way to go from the start. Prime dose would have been a good idea last week. I'm bummed I didn't address it sooner but i was holding out hope it would carb on its own. Only place that would rent me a keg wanted 75 for the setup-I could buy a new keg for that much!!


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