No carbonation ?

I have an Amber Ale that has been in bottles for 3 weeks. Cracked the first one last night. Good taste, but no carbonation at all.
I have an IPA that is ready to bottle this weekend.
I am thinking about bottling the IPA, then emptying all the bottles of Amber into my big tub, adding some priming sugar, adding some of the yeast cake from the IPA, stiring it all up, & bottling it again.
Does that sound like a good idea?

Kevin

sambo said:

I have an Amber Ale that has been in bottles for 3 weeks. Cracked the first one last night. Good taste, but no carbonation at all.
I have an IPA that is ready to bottle this weekend.
I am thinking about bottling the IPA, then emptying all the bottles of Amber into my big tub, adding some priming sugar, adding some of the yeast cake from the IPA, stiring it all up, & bottling it again.
Does that sound like a good idea?

Kevin

Click to expand...

No, it doesn't sound like a good idea. This would oxygenate the heck out of them. What temp were you storing the bottles at? Try gently rolling them around to rouse the yeast that is in them, and let them sit another couple of weeks at 70 -75 degrees, and check them again.

+1 to what Oompa Loompa said. How much/what kinda sugar did you add when you bottled? Also, how did you add the sugar to the beer prior to bottling? Sometimes people don't mix the sugar in well, and get some over-carbed bottled and some that get barley any at all.

Wow!! Glad I asked first. I think I had them stored to cold. Maybe 60-65 deg. I also think we did not mix the priming sugar well. We were trying to bottle while doing a complicated IPA boil.
I will roll the bottles, & move them upstairs. We used 5 oz pre-pack of corn sugar.

Thanks for the advice guys!!

Remember, in order to carbonate the beer has to be at the same temps as fermentation.

I asked the very same question...bring up the temp, roll'em and let'em sit...you will have great beer!!!!

How much priming sugar did you use? How big a batch was it? What temp were the bottles at? There are two possible problems here. The first it that the temp was too low. In that case do as others have metioned here. The other possibility is that not enough priming sugar was used. If that's the case you may need to crack open each bottle and add priming tabs or priming sugar from a sanitized eye dropper then recap and wait 3 weeks. That's what i had to do. The lhbs owner convinced me to used the dropper method (he hates priming tabs and doesn't stock them). I was skeptical but I was actually able to split a cup of priming sugar solution almost perfectly across my whole batch. Just do teh math prior to beginning the task.

I've had a couple batches that took their time carbing. Don't give up after the 3 week mark. After 6 weeks and agitation...you might have problems.