Creamy Foam on top of beer after 4 weeks

Last week I went to bottle and had a bit of a problem, I posted about it in the bottling & kegging forum. I had to rack the beer back into the fermenter with the priming solution in it. So it roused up the yeast a lot. I was advised to give it a week to settle again. Tonight I took a peek and I noticed a creamy foam on the top. It smells fine, a bit yeasty, but fine.

My assumption is that the temperature in my apartment raised a few degrees and the CO2 came out and raised some yeasty foam to the top. When I went to bottle last week I was .002 higher than I expected in terms of specific gravity. I'm not so much worried as curious as to why it happened. It smells great, like I wrote, which is good. Should I bottle in the next few days?

Keep checking your gravity. If it's the same after two readings a few days apart, go ahead and bottle. It sounds like your priming solution caused a little extra fermentation. This created a krausen and that's probably what you're seeing.

So you're saying you racked it onto priming sugar and didn't bottle it? I'm not sure that was a great idea unless there was a huge amount of suspended yeast.

If that's the case I'm not sure how you'd know exactly how much of the priming sugar is remaining. That could make it difficult to know how much to add in again. That variation in your expected gravity is pretty small which is totally fine. That's actually pretty close so it's good. I'd say perhaps use a little less priming sugar than last time and go for it.

I had racked into the bottling bucket and added the priming sugar. I then had a problem with my bottling bucket leaking, which was my fault. There was no way to bottle so I racked it into the only appropriate container, the fermenter. That happened last Tuesday.

I'll check the gravity tomorrow and Thursday. I'm also going to prime a little less. It's a Pale Ale so I can go lower than 4 oz.

I'd just let the yeast ferment out the priming sugar you already added and then start over.

dzlater said:

I'd just let the yeast ferment out the priming sugar you already added and then start over.

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+1. No need to add less priming sugar. The original priming sugar should ferment all the way out.

I did a gravity test and a visual/taste test. My gravity is 2 points lower than I measured it when I went to bottle it. My guess is that I roused the yeast and it did a better job fermenting. Also I thought I had a little too much residual sweetness last week and I tasted less of that this week. I may be getting some fruitiness/apple but this was 1968 yeast and I think that makes sense, I am not getting tartness. The beer is still quite cloudy and I'm guessing if I waited a week more it would not hurt.

Only 4oz. I always put 5oz of priming sugar in my batches sometimes more in the case of a hefeweizen.