Consistant Over Carbonation. Please Help Troubleshoot Cause!

Hi Guys,

I need help troubleshooting heavy over carbonation of pretty much every batch of my beer (8 or 9 batches). This is driving me crazy!

Here are the details:

-I bottle

-Over carbonation not limited to my all-grain batches, it is in my extract batches as well.

-Fermentation is (seemingly) complete. The FG ranges are within yeast attenuation.

-I ferment 3 weeks in primary and 3 weeks in secondary. Then Cold Crash and bottle.

-Light carbonation in bottles around weeks 2-4, then it reaches a point to where it is so carbonated that it will overflow out the top. I have to open a beer and let it sit for a good 45 minutes to hit the right carbonation level.

-No off tastes to the beer, it tastes just fine.

-I sanitize with a fresh batch of star san every time, and clean my equipment pretty good. (However my fermenter is plastic, possible contamination that is stuck in there?)

-Prime with about 4 oz of priming sugar.

Today I tried opening all my beer to let it sit and recap later to salvage the batch, however I opened two and the foam sprayed me right in the face and got on the damn ceiling and walls!

Any ideas would be great guys. I just brewed up an extract batch of Surly Furious, so I'm desperate to get this carbonation down.

4oz for a 5 gallon batch doesn't sound bad at all. I would try to do some more investigation toward your sanitizing practices. Maybe the fermenter would be a good place to start. Gushers shouldn't be the norm.

That's what I'm kind of thinking. Maybe I'll pick up a glass carboy for my next batch of beer and see what happens.

The only thing that confuses me is that there are no off tastes that I can pick up. Would an infection or wild yeast be anything I could taste??

4oz is about 1 cup if you are using corn sugar. You could try 3 or even 2 oz.

"About four ounces "

How much is about? 3.5? 4.5? That's a huge difference between "about " 4 ounces, when you're talking priming sugar. I'd recommend a scale and the use of a priming calculator. I use the one at tastybrew.com. also, you should know your volume into the bottling bucket pretty close. Also make sure to use the maximum temperature your beer reached during active fermentation.

It is almost exactly 4 oz of corn sugar. And I mix it with 4.75 gallons of beer. Maybe with this batch I will try priming with 2 oz and if it is over carbonated I'll then look into getting a new non plastic primary fermenter.

Can filling your bottles too much cause over carbonation? This batch I had about 1 and a half fingers of headspace in the bottles.

Thanks for all the replies!

1. Are all bottles like that or are some flat and some gushers?

2.How well is the priming solution mixed in?

When I bottle, I first pour the priming solution into the bottling bucket.
Then I rack in the beer.
I mix it up with a spoon (no splashing).

Then I start bottling.
Halfway through I mix it again (no splashing).

I'll second the question about consistency between bottles. Is it every bottle that's over carbed or just some? If some, then it's a matter of not mixing in your priming sugar well enough. If you're adding dry sugar right to the beer before bottling it's really hard to get evenly distributed. I suggest boiling the sugar in water for a few minutes to sterilize then adding it to the bottling bucket - then adding the beer on top of it. This will give you a good starting distribution then you can gently stir a few times to gaurantee that it's even.

If it's every bottle - then you might need to look at infection as the cause. You can try to clean everything again or if you have the resources you could replace the plastic portions of your brew equipment that are in contact with the beer after the boil. That's the surest way to see if it's an infection or not.

All bottles are gushers. I pour my mixture of priming sugar and water into the bottling bucket then rack and stir lightly so it should be mixed well.

I may end up trying out a glass carboy for fermenting and seeing what happens.

I mean if it's happened with the last 9 batches it must be an infection right? There's no way it's not fermented all the way because it gets fermented down within the yeasts attenuation range.

As long as you're letting it ferment, I really doubt that it would not be finished. Just the same, you should really check gravity 2 days apart to be sure it's perfectly steady. It's a good safety practice.

I had a problem with gushers for two straight batches. I was certainly not overcarbonating, and the beer tasted fine other than the fact that they sprayed about 3/4 of the beer 6 feet into the air when opened. I narrowed it down to a minor infection, and further narrowed that down to one of my fermentors and/or my ball valve. I cleaned the ever living crap out of both, even taking the ball valve apart, and have not had the gusher issue since. My fermentor has just a bit of caked krausen in a hard to reach spot, and there was about 1/2 a pea of gunked hops in my ball valve. I can only conclude that one of those two added enough contamination to my batch to cause the gusher, but not enough to otherwise affect the batch.

Anyway, all that to say, clean the crap out of your equipment and the gushers will probably stop. I don't think you have a priming sugar issue.

Getting a glass carboy isn't going to fix anything for you, except empty your wallet.
Save the money and get 2 Better bottles.

Topher- that may be my issue. My problem is exactly the same as yours with beer blasting me in the face when i open the bottle. After inspecting my ball valve on my primary fermenter, there was a tiny bit of gunk leftover. I can't seem to get it out either. I'll buy a new fermenter and see if that fixes it!

Thanks for all the help guys like always

We've also been having some over carbonation issues. Not gushers, but too fizzy and some overflow if opened and left in the bottle on the counter instead of being poured in a glass. On our first batch we ever made we had gushers. Not knowing what we were doing we didn't measure the honey and just thought we'd add a good amount for "flavor". Terrible idea as they all almost exploded when opened. Lesson learned. We have used less and less honey each time, but after one week of carbonating they are overly carbonated. Just had to put 4 gallons of bottled beer in the fridge in hopes of slowing down the carbonation while we work through them. Some are Grolsch bottles (realized too late we only had 17 bottle caps) so I think we will pop and re-cap those.

I am wondering if we have some sort of infection somewhere. My husband sanitizes everything really well, but we must be missing something. Thanks for this post. I will keep looking for a possible cause.

3oz for 5 gallons should be the rule of thumb.

Get a scale and weigh your corn sugar/dextrose. Be sure of the volume you are bottling. If you only end up with 4.5 gallons to bottle - adjust the 3oz down accordingly.

How long are you letting them sit in the fridge? If you don't give the CO2 enough time to get into solution in the fridge I know gushers are possible. Just an idea!

This is one reason i eventually moved to kegging. Worrying about each bottle was going to ruin this hobby for me.

I think the problem is over priming. "about 4 ounces" in 4 1/2 gallons is a pretty stiff prime if it is towards the high side of 4 ounces. I prime 4 ounces into 5.5 gallons and get a pretty high carbonation. Folks always seem to look at infection, but I think it's just process- always go with the most simple solution; it's usually the right one.

Each time prior to using the bottling bucket have you taken the spigot out of the bucket and totally disassembled, cleaned, and sanitized all the bits?

We used the TBS measurement for honey, but will probably try a different sugar method for the next batch to see if we can get it more precice. A friend had no complaints about the batch, but we compared our clone to the real deal, and ours is definitely more fizzy tasting. I think this specific beer is just brewed with less carbonation maybe? It's Inversion IPA.