1st Batch Ready???

My first batch is about ready I think...Cream Ale kit...11 days Primary, 14 days secondary and 12 days bottle...put 3 bottles in fridge last night and tonight I start tasting...looked at the bootles and not much setiment on bottom....are they ready?...

maybe?

another week before refrigeration would probably do em good though.

You'll get a good idea. Time will always do good things. But as long as your FG was stable, 12 days in the bottle should at least give some carbonation. The beers will definitely get better over time in the bottle though.

Agree. They will have some carb. I drank my first beer at around 8 days and then kept drinking it. I had one that had been in bottle for 3 months recently...it was definitely more crisp and clean.

thanks...hoping for drinkable with the promise of tastey in a couple of weeks

tried one over the weekend...nice taste... a little under carbed...but there is no yeast sediment on the bottom of the bottle???? yeast still working, beer too young?

The carb level will come up some. How much priming sugar did you use? And what size batch did you make?

I find that the amount of sediment on the bottom of the bottles vary greatly. Some beers have a lot of sediment and some have almost none. I guess it depends on the recipe, type of yeast and how much trub gets transferred when bottling.

If your beer is not clear, more time may let sediment fall.

As long as my beer is not cloudy, I don't worry about it and feel lucky for one more sip on brews that have very little sediment.

If the beer tastes good who cares if there is sediment or not.

kh54s10 said:

If the beer tastes good who cares if there is sediment or not.

Click to expand...

This. I kegged a Honey Orange Wheat last Friday and had too much to fit in a single Keg. I put about a gallon of it into another keg and the first few pours were very cloudy, like milkshake cloudy. I poured those out but the subsequent glasses were still fairly cloudy. It tasted great though...I don't care if I'm drinking some yeast and trub as long as it tastes good.

the beerh makes me think that the yeast is not done yet?...but absolutely zero sediment ...sounds like at least another week maybe more...it has been aging at around 68 degrees...I was hoping taht a cream ale would finish a little quicker...

Just because you wanted it to be ready at 12 days doesn't mean it would be.
It's the standard response because it's 99.9% the right one, otherwise there wouldn't be a DAILY barrage of "It's been 2 weeks and my beer's not carbed" threads, would there be?

The 3 weeks at 70 degrees, that we recommend is the minimum time it takes for average gravity beers to carbonate and condition. Higher grav beers take longer.

Stouts and porters have taken me between 6 and 8 weeks to carb up..I have a 1.090 Belgian strong that took three months to carb up.


Temp and gravity are the two factors that contribute to the time it takes to carb beer. But if a beer's not ready yet, or seems low carbed, and you added the right amount of sugar to it, then it's not stalled, it's just not time yet.

Everything you need to know about carbing and conditioning, can be found here Of Patience and Bottle Conditioning. With emphasis on the word, "patience."

Lazy Llama came up with a handy dandy chart to determine how long something takes in brewing, whether it's fermentation, carbonation, bottle conditioning....



If a beer isn't carbed by "x number of weeks" you just have to give them more time. If you added your sugar, then the beer will carb up eventually, it's really a foolroof process. All beers will carb up eventually. A lot of new brewers think they have to "troubleshoot" a bottling issue, when there really is none, the beer knows how to carb itself. In fact if you run beersmiths carbing calculator, some lower grav beers don't even require additional sugar to reach their minimum level of carbonation.

We don't tell folks to wait because we want to torture new brewers and make them want to leave the hobby so there are less of them to compete against at contests and we want to be able to by their gear off craigslist dirt cheap. We tell them that, because that's how long it tends to take.

And all you have to do is see all those threads on here every week where folks complained about lack of carb and when you ask them how long the beer's been in the bottle they say it's been under three weeks. And if you follow up on those threads, usually the OP comes back after that period to announce their beer is carbed fine now....

Carbing is a natural process, it takes as long as it takes....and that's usually longer than we all want it to.