Crud in my beer after using carb tabs

Two weeks after bottling a Brown ale, I realized that I forgot to add bottling sugar. I popped all the tops, added muntons carb tabs and recapped. Now 5 days later I can see grungy looking particles in the top inch of the bottle necks. Ive never seen this before. Has anyone else experience this? will it finally settle out?

Assuming you sanitized the caps that you recapped with, I'm betting you simply have what's called a bottle krausen...it's the same thing that happens in your fermenter, and sometimes happens when priming with DME....the top fermenting yeast is fermenting the sugars in the primetab...it should fall like in the fermenter and be ready in a couple more weeks.....

Beerbeque said:

...I realized that I forgot to add bottling sugar...

Click to expand...

Did you remember to add the yeast?


A check list for beginner brewers can go a long way.

BierMuncher said:

Did you remember to add the yeast?


A check list for beginner brewers can go a long way.

Click to expand...

A check list for any brewer is a good thing...I nearly forgot to pitch the yeast on a brew wednesday...I even went so far as to aerate and put the airlock on, and lift the carboy up, before I looked over and saw the proofed yeast sitting there....

BierMuncher said:

Did you remember to add the yeast?


A check list for beginner brewers can go a long way.

Click to expand...

Now don't be too critical...at least he remembered to put the beer in!

The Cooper's carb drops don't seem to cause that krausen ring the way the Munton's sometimes do.

The muntons drops would never dissolve completely when I used them. I would get little clumps of sugar floating around in my beer, usually at the top of the bottle. I just add powdered dextrose now as I only used the carb tabs on 1 gallon batches.

Muntons carb tabs have a mixture of DME and dextrose. So the crud you're seeing is a result of the DME. It won't hurt anything. One thing (among others) I don't like about Muntons carb tabs is that they tend to not dissolve all the way... leaving little white bits in your finished beer... and, consequentially, not carbing it as much as you intended.

EDIT: Woops, Benny already covered the "not dissolving all the way" issue.

I noticed the exact same problem with the tabs, I stopped using them because of it.

Me too! Little white floaties that wouldn't dissolve. I don't usem any more either.

Has anyone ever seen Carb-tabs cause black little floaties? Just wondering, I reviewed a beer that had them in it. Two styles, two batches, both exhibited the issue. Both were carbed using Carb-tabs. Just curious.

The only time I've seen black floaties is when a bottle wasn't cleaned out thoroughly from it's previous usage.