Carbonation Levels

First of all I want to say thanks to everyone here in this forum. I am new to Homebrewing. I have my 3rd brew in the primary fermenter right now. This is also my first post in the forum. I would have posted earlier, but I did not need to because all I had to do was perform a search and my answer was right there.

My question deals with carbonation levels. First of all, I am a extract brewer using bottles. My first two brews were bottled in a combination of 12oz bottles, and 16 oz flip-tops. I used 3/4 cup of corn sugar, added to my bottling bucket, then bottled from there. After conditioning for 2 weeks, I sampled the brews and they were good. The only thing that seemed odd was that the smaller 12 oz bottles seemed to be more carbonated than the 16 oz flip-tops. Would the size of the bottle make the carbonation levels different between the two?

By the way my first brew was a Weizenbock extract kit from The Homebrewery (Very good brew), my second was an American Cream Ale from Brewers Best with some vanilla extract added (conditioning week one), my third (brewed yesterday) is a Fat Tire clone (tastes yummy so far) and my next brew, which I have ordered the ingredients for is Cheesefood's Vanilla Cream Ale. :cross:

Much Appreciated!!!

Brew_Meister said:

I used 3/4 cup of corn sugar, added to my bottling bucket, then bottled from there.

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Welcome aboard Brew_Meister. After boiling the sugar in water for 10 minutes, you added the cooled sugar-water to your bottling bucket then racked on top of it? If you followed the procedure, your mixture should have been fairly consistant.

Brew_Meister said:

The only thing that seemed odd was that the smaller 12 oz bottles seemed to be more carbonated than the 16 oz flip-tops. Would the size of the bottle make the carbonation levels different between the two?

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I've found that the larger the bottle, the less sugar needed to carbonate the contents. As seen by some when naturally carbonating a keg, about half of the sugar normally used to bottle is used for kegging.

Open another after the third week and see if the carbonation level has changed. At what temp did you condition at? Other than temp and mixture, the last item could be fill level. Maybe someone else can chime in on this.

Wild

May be it's just there is more liquid to carb and it takes a little longer.

Passload said:

May be it's just there is more liquid to carb and it takes a little longer.

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That is kind of what I was thinking because all of the 12 oz bottles carbonation levels are the same and all of the flip-tops are the same.

wild said:

Open another after the third week and see if the carbonation level has changed. At what temp did you condition at? Other than temp and mixture, the last item could be fill level.

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I will wait to see if the carbonation levels of the bigger bottles evens out with more time. The conditioning temp was between 63 and 67.

Thanks for the help!!!

I've got the same deal going with my Oktoberfest. The 12 oz.'ers are a little "feistier" with the carbonation. They're about a month old.

I, too, have seen the same thing happen, I used 12 oz and 1 pint 6 oz bottles. The larger, 24 oz, bottles have had less carbonation up until recently. It is most likely the fact that there is more liquid to carbonate, thus more time to do so.