Beer carbonated like a Soda!

I brewed my first batch (4 since then) a month and a half ago, a Dry stout that I kept in primary for 4 weeks, I bottled 18 days ago, and yesterday after bottling a porter I made 2 weeks after this, I decided to see how it was doing and opened a bottle, have to say that I also opened a bottle a week after bottling and it had a lot of head but the body itself wasn't very bubbly, this time the beer is waaay carbonated, it feels like I'm drinking a coke! with a bubbling feeling in my throat.

I primed with "piloncillo" which is mexican brown sugar, the bottles have been kept at room temperature ~65-70 in a dark closet, is this normal? Is there anything I can do about it? I must also add that I didn't like the flavor, it wasn't bad but there's a bitter aftertaste that just didn't make me happy, I've heard that age might help with this flavor, should I aged them cold so they don't carbonate anymore?

Any tips?

Yes, I would keep them cold. Also keep an eye on them and take precautions in the event that they do turn into bottle bombs. Did you add sugar to a bottling bucket or did you add it to each bottle individually?

As for the flavor, off-flavors will usually mellow out over time...but sometimes if the flavor is related to the ingredients used or your process it is a lot harder to get rid of. For example the bitterness could just be from a heavily roasted grain where too much was used in relation to what you're used to tasting. If it still tastes too bitter, take a look at your recipe. Sometimes people also notice a bitterness from tannins which can be extracted from the grain by using water that is too hot. Hope things turn out and we can sort it out for you.

Thanks for the reply, I did add the sugar to a bottling bucket, I tasted the beer after the sugar was mixed in and it was much better than now.. So I'll just put them in the fridge and wait a couple of weeks to see if the flavor mellows out a bit, thanks!

I too had some beers that were too carbonated....foamed up after uncapping....so I tried something I thought would help....took some new bottle caps and sanitized them and uncapped the remaining over-carbonated beers one at a time and immediately re-capped each.......that did the trick for me....it is a gamble to judge just how much C02 will come out of suspension but payed off for me....maybe try it on a couple but make sure the bottles are cold

I once brewed a brown ale and added some brown sugar to it (during the boil rather than at bottling) and experienced similar results... bitter, medicinal taste to it with a thin body. It was my 2nd batch or something like that so I of course didn't wait for it to mature in the bottle before downing all of them so I can't speak to how aging benefitted it but I can say that brown sugar is basically normal table sugar with a touch of molasses added to it. cane sugar will add to your ABV & give your yeast enough food to carb your beer but will also thin the body of the beer, thus the typical use of corn sugar as a priming agent.

it seems counter intuitive, but beers that haven't fully conditioned often seem overcarbonated. when you first tasted the beer, the yeast likely hadn't finished working on the priming sugar, and when you tasted it the second time it could be it wasn't fully conditioned. dark beer often takes a while longer to condition, so just let it age for a while and in a month you might find it's just right. 18 days is too short a conditioning time for almost every beer to begin with, 21 days is usually the minimum

out of curiosity, how much sugar did you use?

How much sugar did you use to prime?

I used 3/4 of a cup for 5 gallons.. I will put one in the fridge and give the rest some time...

I bottled my porter yesterday with the same quantity, I hadn't heard that anything other than corn sugar would thin it out and thought that brown sugar might work well with dark beers, I've a dunkelweizen that I need to bottle this weekend, corn sugar all the way then! I will update you in a few weeks to tell you the difference between the one in the fridge and the rest of them, hopefully the flavor will get better because although my friends said it wasn't bad, I was expecting much better beer..

Just to make sure that I'm not giving one-sided advice I should clear up that brown sugar isn't necessarily a cut and dry "no-no" in brewing and it definitely can work well in some darker beers which is why there are a handful of commercial examples of darker ales brewed with brown sugar and why there are plenty of homebrewers who have had success utilizing it as well.

In all honestly, the small amount of brown sugar you likely added to prime with probably won't have a huge impact on the body as it was a small percentage of your total fermentables but it could thin it down some.

Check out How to Brew for a simple explanation of different sugars usage as priming agents:
http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter11-3.html

bajabrewer7 said:

I used 3/4 of a cup for 5 gallons.. I will put one in the fridge and give the rest some time...

I bottled my porter yesterday with the same quantity, I hadn't heard that anything other than corn sugar would thin it out and thought that brown sugar might work well with dark beers, I've a dunkelweizen that I need to bottle this weekend, corn sugar all the way then! I will update you in a few weeks to tell you the difference between the one in the fridge and the rest of them, hopefully the flavor will get better because although my friends said it wasn't bad, I was expecting much better beer..

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Oh jeez. So that might be a problem. If it is anything like "normal" brown cane sugar it is very compressible and 3/4 cup will never be the same weight twice. Get a cheap scale and measure dry weight, not volume.

Also, did you boil the sugar for 5 minutes to ensure it was sanitized and fully dissolved? And did you put that simple-syrup solution at the bottom of your bottling bucket and rack your beer on top of it? Otherwise you may have uneven carbonation and the one you opened got more sugar than others.

I had a batch of bottle bombs in a barley wine. Very expensive beer to brew in the heart of the hop crisis so i decided to try to save the beer by venting the caps. Basically, take a bottle opener and open it just enough to let some CO2 out then cap quickly before it foams out of the top. Do not pull the cap off all the way, just vent and recap. My barley wine took 10 ventings like that to finally get at a comfortable level

Yes, I did boil the sugar with a little water, and what I measured as 3/4 of a cup was the syrup that resulted.. I will try the beer this weekend to see if anything has changed and will let you know! Thx

I've always had problems priming with anything except dextrose. Any table sugar, brown sugar, anything like that has always lead to massive overcarbonation and bottle bombs for me. Just stick to dextrose from your LHBS.

As for how to fix it, recapping is really the only way, although it's a crapshoot as to whether it'll recarbonate enough.

bajabrewer7 said:

Yes, I did boil the sugar with a little water, and what I measured as 3/4 of a cup was the syrup that resulted.. I will try the beer this weekend to see if anything has changed and will let you know! Thx

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But how much sugar did you use to make the simple syrup solution?

Clann said:

But how much sugar did you use to make the simple syrup solution?

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Exactly. I could have 3/4 cup of simple syrup with half a pound of sugar in it. The important thing is the dry weight, not the dry volume and certainly not the wet volume.