My amber ale has little/ no head retention

It's been the bottle for about 2 weeks and its the first one I've popped open. The recipe was for a Jamaican amber ale I got out of one of my homebrew books. It also doesn't have to much carbonation either. Since this is only my second extract brew I know I still have lots to learn. What could have cause this problem?

Give it more time. At least three weeks at room temp in the bottle then a few days in the fridge. Also the bigger the beer the longer it takes to carb up. Time is your friend.

grem135 said:

Give it more time. At least three weeks at room temp in the bottle then a few days in the fridge. Also the bigger the beer the longer it takes to carb up. Time is your friend.

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Yup, this. Give it more time. Be patient.

also, be sure your glasses are beer ready. If you run them through a dishwasher, stop doing that. Wash them by hand. To return them to beer ready state, wash them with salt and a touch of water to scrub off the "streak free shine" stuff left behind by dishwasher detergents and Jet Dry.

EDIT: the glass cleaning won't cure the head retention problem at 2 weeks in the bottle. It's just a PSA so you don't end up carbing properly and looking for problems in your process when its just a glass issue.

What was your recipe and how much priming sugar did you use? How did you add the priming sugar to the bottling bucket? In my experience, if a beer isn't carbed in 2 weeks at room temperature, it's not going to improve much in the third week.

If the priming sugar wasn't well mixed, you could have varied carbonation levels. I've had bottles from the same batch where one is basically effervescent in a week and another is flat after a month.

If the beer is under-primed, time can indeed improve this a little.