Recapping Bottles for Carbonation Problems

I have a Belgain Tripel that's about 10% ABV that was in primary for 2+months, secondary for 2+ months (1 month at near freezing) and now in thick bottles for 2 months with priming sugar to 4 vol of CO2, kept above 70F and inverted a few times to rouse the yeast. The beer is totally flat.

Can someone recommend dry yeast and a sanitary way to open each bottle and re-yeast?

A lot of belgian breweries use T-58 the alcohol tolerance of the strain it´s 11.5 ABV,altough it perrforms better with beer around 9. You can always wait a little longer to see if the bottles finally carb.

I'd go with a high alcohol tolerant yeast like a champagne yeast. The trick is, how are you going to do this without oxidizing your beer. Short answer, I'm not sure if you can. I've never had good luck on re-bottling a beer. You might try force carbonating the beer using kegs/CO2 if you are going to drink it within a few days. Other than that, IMHO, you've got a problem.

I wouldn't worry too much about sanitation with a beer that's sitting at 10%. A lot of that yeast is going to die when it rehydrates in all that alcohol though...

aiptasia said:

I'd go with a high alcohol tolerant yeast like a champagne yeast. The trick is, how are you going to do this without oxidizing your beer. Short answer, I'm not sure if you can. I've never had good luck on re-bottling a beer. You might try force carbonating the beer using kegs/CO2 if you are going to drink it within a few days. Other than that, IMHO, you've got a problem.

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The bottles have no pressure so I was hoping to open them one at a time, quickly add yeast and recap with a new cap. Is this possible and how would you go about adding the yeast (just dry or rehydrated in a very small amount of water with an eyedropper)?, and how much? I can see big problems with dumping them into a bucket to start bottling over.

A syringe would probably be quicker than an eye dropper, and speed is of the essence in this situation.

After some internet reading I'm going to store these cap-down for a few days and then invert again and store them above 70F for a month before trying another. Just going to keep trying for carbonation without opening them again. If it gets to 6+months I'll open each bottle and put a few grains of T-58 in and recap with new caps.

On-paper this was a perfect brew (water, mash pH, original gravity per the recipe, very high attenuation...), would stink to do anything too drastic.

Some tipping and patience helped a lot. I noticed some bottles had more sediment when tipping and chilled one of those, it was perfectly carbonated.

I'm sure I gently mixed the sugar in at bottling. Each bottle is it's own environment and may just carbonate at different rates.

I'm going to bottle another 8+% ABV beer soon and am going to try rehydrating a pack of S05 and pitch about 1/3 of it (1 million cells/mL).