Hop hammer didn't carbonate

So I opened a couple of my hop hammers tonight for a friend and I. Original Gravity was 1.084. Abv calculated at 9.4%. I transferred to a secondary after about a week. Dry hopped and cold crashed after about 5 days in secondary. I bottled after two weeks and I opened the beers after two weeks of bottle conditioning. They were flat. Any ideas? Was this jus due to the high alcohol content. Why does that affect carbonation time? Is there a chance all the yeast I needed for carbonation was left in the primary. New to this and I have not encountered the no carbonation before.

Thanks for any advice.

Two weeks is sometimes not enough time to carbonate for low ABV beers. The fact that your beer is 9.7% ABV is most likely the reason it's flat. As the alcohol content increases, the less yeast will survive.

Living in one's own metabolic excrement doesn't sound fun.

As far leaving yeast in primary goes, there should always be yeast suspended in your beer, unless you add something that removes it or you filter it. Even cold crashing and fining with gelatin should allow enough yeast to be left over for carbonating.

I would say it's a combination of factors ... Racking to secondary, cold crashing, and higher ABV. You will still have enough yeast in The bottles to carbonate, just give them a little more time.

Any particular reason you racked to secondary?

I transferred to a secondary per the instructions in brewing classic styles I realize that sometimes people will not follow this advice but since it was the first time I wanted to try to do everything to be as successful as possible hoping that it will carbonate after a little time.

Racking to secondary can be a good idea if you're going to add fruit or oak chips, dry hop, or age your brew for a couple of months or more.

https://byo.com/mead/item/569-dry-hopping-techniques

This article explains zones of the pros and cons of dry hopping in secondary.

Going on 3.5 weeks and still not carbonated. Any idea what I could do to fix or what went wrong ? Be patient ?

What is the temp where the bottles are being kept? They might do better slightly warmer? I did a Tripel that was in that ballpark for ABV, and it took a couple of months to get up to moderate carbonation. To the point that I considered opening each bottle and dosing with fresh yeast and additional sugars.

Being patient seems to be the name of the game here though. Trust the yeast to get you there.

In the kitchen above the fridge in a cabinet. Definitely not cold.

I used a hop bag to filter when transferring to the bottling bucket. I think maybe that may have filtered out my yeast ? Learn from my mistakes.

The hop bag is way too porous to filter yeast

Good to know. I'll just be patient !

Mystery was solved. I didnt stir when I added the beer to the priming sugar water. Ended up with at least one super carbonated bottle.

I learned that lesson with an imperial saison I made last year. About half carbonated and we're amazing and half we're flat or way undercarbed

n/m, didn't realize there was 2 pages. DOH!

The last beer I made is an Oktoberfest. I wanted to take some of it up with me for my Oktoberfest vacation and opened one after 2 weeks in the bottle. It was dead flat. After one more week it was fully carbonated. When I prime my beer I use a bottling bucket and put the syphon tube all the way at the bottom right in the priming solution. That way when I rack my beer into my bottling bucket the beer mixes the sugar solution without having to stir it in.

AZCoolerBrewer said:

The last beer I made is an Oktoberfest. I wanted to take some of it up with me for my Oktoberfest vacation and opened one after 2 weeks in the bottle. It was dead flat. After one more week it was fully carbonated. When I prime my beer I use a bottling bucket and put the syphon tube all the way at the bottom right in the priming solution. That way when I rack my beer into my bottling bucket the beer mixes the sugar solution without having to stir it in.

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I do the exact same thing. However, this time with the cold crashing I did there was probably such a temperature difference between that and the priming solution that I should have stirred and also cooled the priming solution longer.