Painfully Slow Carbonation

I bottled a barleywine two months ago or so and today curiosity got the best of me so I popped one open. I got a mellow "pfft" on opening and on tasting it is barely carbed at all. I just drank 22 oz of somewhat-green, mostly-flat 11.9% barleywine. All things considered, it wasn't terrible.

The beer is heavily hopped (7 oz + 2 oz dry, 100+ IBU) and fairly high in alcohol content (11.9%) but not so high that it exceeded the maximum alcohol tolerance of the champagne yeast I tossed in the bottling bucket. I know the environment is rather harsh with all of the alcohol and hops, but I was surprised it hadn't carbed much after two months at room temperature.

And yes. I'm absolutely sure I added priming sugar

Anyone else have this sort of experience? Did the beer eventually carb?

I had this happen to me once. Either the yeast you used cant survive the alcohol content or too much settled out before bottling to ensure a healthy carb. My solution was a huge pain in the ass but it worked. I a dry ale yeast and opened every single bottle, added a few yeastees and re-capped. Worked like a charm.

There's nothing wrong...it's a big beer you have there, it will take time. The 3 weeks at 70 degrees, that 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."

If a beer isn't carbed by "x number of weeks" you just have to give them ore 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. Just time.

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



So forget about this beer for awhile. It will be fine.

You're talking a Barleywine here, I wouldn't even be contemplating openning my first one for at least a year.