Craig311

Recipes 

New to kegging and decided I'd play around with fast carbonating. The beer was flat and hooked up to 30 PSI. I shook it 5 times and waited for the regulator to stop feeding gas in between each. The whole thing took maybe 3 mins. I purged the headspace and beer came out of the release valve. Once completely purged (and mess cleaned up) I tried to pour a beer and it was 100% foam.

Am I missing something or did I actually over carbonate the beer severely in just a few minutes?

badbrew

Recipes 

You have to give it a couple minutes to settle down. It's not an ATM.

Craig311

Recipes 

Lol. It's been a couple of hours now set at serving PSI. I will check on it soon.

I guess this is my uneducated question... Why when I was in high school and dragging kegs into the woods for a party did I understand it would need to sit for quite a while before pouring foam. Yet these fast carb methods mention nothing about letting the beer sit after shaking the **** out of it?

Antler

Recipes 

Yeah it was probably still flat, you just foamed the **** out of it.
I'm not sure of temps or pressure my LHBS uses, but I bring my beer to him to carbonate and bottle (I don't have my setup done yet). He kegs it, chills, carbonates and bottles the beer, all in ~24hrs. He won't tell me the details of his temps or pressure.

Craig311

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Thanks. It came out like a rocket and was foam city, but the beer itself was flat for sure.

Dan

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That is interesting. How is the carbonation? Is the beer ready to drink?

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JRems

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He probably uses a carbonation stone. Once it's chilled all you do it raise the psi slowly a little every hour until you reach serving pressure and it's fully carbed.

Antler

Recipes 

Yes, the carbonation is great and I've drank some that evening. Obviously a little fresh as with any beer that young, but otherwise it's always been perfectly done.


I doubt it, he leaves the store just after 6pm, doesn't reopen until 10am the following morning, so it's unlikely.

Craig311

Recipes 

No stone. Just shaking. The beer is still mostly flat, just pouring out as foam.

JuanMoore

Recipes 

If the beer is cold, it's actually very easy to overcarbonate it in just a few minutes using both agitation and high pressure. Since you didn't let it settle at all, we don't really know if it's overcarbed or not.

It may sound strange, but overcarbonated beer will usually taste very flat, so the fact that it tasted flat doesn't tell you anything. The reason that overcarbed beer tastes flat is that all of the excess CO2 rushes to leave the beer, setting off a chain reaction that takes the rest of the CO2 with it, in the form of foam, leaving you with foam and flat beer. All of the foam also has no CO2 left in it, so if you were drinking what was once foam that then settled out, it would taste flat no matter what the carbonation level was. Beer coming out like a rocket typically indicates that it's either overcarbed or that the serving line is way too short.

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