Too much priming sugar?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Pontiac_Guy

Well-Known Member
Joined
Oct 27, 2012
Messages
88
Reaction score
4
Location
Columbus
So on friday I bottled my batch of Caribou Slobber, but was only able to pull just over 4 gallons from the carboy. Stupid me added the priming sugar solution to the mixing bucket before I started pulling from the carboy. So I added 5oz of corn sugar to the 4 gallons I was able to bottle. I'm using 500ml swing top bottles. Does anyone have any experience with over-priming? I really don't want any explosions to happen here. I'm thinking about popping the tops off and letting them sit for a couple days.

Also, I remember seeing a chart of normal pressure limits for each type of bottle a while back. I think the german ones I'm using now can hold somewhere around 3.5-4 CO2. Not sure though. Thanks for your help.
 
It depends on how you are conditioning them. If they are at 70* or higher, they will start carbonating pretty quickly. If it was me, I might use one as a dummy part and open it periodically to determine when I am actually letting out pressure. Once that happens, I would open and close all of them. I would not leave them open for days.

That's just me.
 
Have done this same thing several times. One was 5 oz in 3.5 gallons. Am using the swing top EZ caps for almost everything. No problems yet, but then again; they have been in the bottles for only a month or so.

The swing tops are supposed to "burp" to relieve excess carb. Hopefully I'll find this to be the case in practice.

At 4 gallons and 5 oz, the Beer Recipator shows about 3.2 volumes CO2. Not ridiculously high.
 
Well, for the style of beer, you've over-carb'd. Caribou slobber is technically an English brown ale. On four gallons bottled at 70 degrees f, you should've been closer to 2.75 oz corn sugar to reach a carbonation volume of 2.1.

Definitely DO NOT remove the tops. Exposing your beer to oxygen at this point will make it oxidize, and it'll wind up tasting like old wet cardboard. What I would do is relocate them to an area where if they do pop open, it won't create much of a mess. Like, the inside of a cheap plastic storage tub.

Combine that with any left over malt the yeast didn't get to yet, and hmm... six to one and pick em. If they don't pop, they're going to be foamy like they have a gusher bug. This is no big deal as long as you can pour the beer into something to de-gas a little bit. Fine for drinking just not so good for beer competitions.
 
Thanks for the quick responses. I just opened a test bottle and there was a very loud "pop" sound from it. Loads of head too when I poured it.

I'm really just concerned if the bottles are going to blow up at any point.
 
Pontiac_Guy said:
Thanks for the quick responses. I just opened a test bottle and there was a very loud "pop" sound from it. Loads of head too when I poured it.

I'm really just concerned if the bottles are going to blow up at any point.

EZ Cap bottles are super heavy glass- I have no empirical data but if you sealed them with the swing tops I would say the closure will fail long before the bottle.
I've used EZ Cap since the beginning. I've never heard of any bottles failing - even in the bottle bomb threads.
Over carbonated? You betcha' ! Bombs -doubtful.
Only speaking for the swing tops though. If you crowned any bottles (EZ Caps included) you should get them in the fridge and drink them soon.
 
Does anybody know how to calculate the volumes of CO2 as a function of temperature by hand. I think it will be more intuitive for me if I can figure out the relationship. I hate getting near some over carbed bottles in the pantry and feel like I need a flak jacket to get my captain crunch.
 
Thanks for the quick responses. I just opened a test bottle and there was a very loud "pop" sound from it. Loads of head too when I poured it.

I'm really just concerned if the bottles are going to blow up at any point.

If you just bottled this on Friday, why are you opening, i.e. "Wasting" beer now? They're not going to be ready for a minimum of 3 weeks. Every one you open early is one less beer you're going to have when the beer's are actually drinkable.

You're not in danger of bottle bombs. Your beer is going to be slightly over carbed for it's style, but so what. If you look at carbing to style charts, you'll see that carbonation for each style is usually a range. Some folks, especially Americans who grew up drinking highly carbed "fizzy yellow beer" are actually conditioned in many ways to prefer the high end of the carb range. The 4.5-5 ounces of sugar is meant to produced 2-2.5 volumes of c02 in a 5 gallon batch of beer. What you added is tantamount to ONLY a quarter ounce extra of sugar/gallon of beer, so where you would have normally had 2.5 volumes with the whole 5 ounces, you probably have around 2.8 or so....nothing to worry about. Your bottles aren't going to explode (they're rated much higher than that, more like 3.5 volumes.)

Right now opening them you might have popping and or gushing not because there's a problem, but because the co2 is in the headspace, not in SOLUTION yet. So it's not really a judgement of if your beer is over carbed or not.

Just walk away from them for a couple more weeks. The yeast don't need you to hover over the bottles. Just let them do their job. You've done what every new brewer has done at one time or another, had more trub loss or racking loss that you accounted for in priming sugar...so what? It's not the end of the world, and it's not like you added an extra OUNCE PER GALLON of beer or something, when you think about it in terms of ounces per gallon, it really isn't a heck of a lot of extra sugar....
 
You should be fine. That's not way too much. You will have somewhere around 3 volumes of CO2. Most regular bottles are not recommended for anything over 3 to 4 volumes, but are usually designed for at least 6. Working to a lower level eliminates problems due to variation in bottles.

Last year I had a 22 ouncer blow at about 9 volumes. I know that because I checked the gravity in other bottles from the batch and found it hadn't finished when I bottled it and had continued to ferment in the bottle. That was the only bottle in the batch that broke, but I had plenty of 12 and 22 ounce bottles that saw the same pressure.

The swing tops are supposed to "burp" to relieve excess carb. Hopefully I'll find this to be the case in practice.

EZ Cap bottles are super heavy glass- I have no empirical data but if you sealed them with the swing tops I would say the closure will fail long before the bottle.
I've used EZ Cap since the beginning. I've never heard of any bottles failing - even in the bottle bomb threads.
Over carbonated? You betcha' ! Bombs -doubtful.
Only speaking for the swing tops though. If you crowned any bottles (EZ Caps included) you should get them in the fridge and drink them soon.

Swing top bottles will blow. I had a Fischer bottle go on me about 15 years ago. That and the bottle mentioned above are the only 2 I've lost in about 15 years of brewing. I remember the bottle left glass embedded in the wall, and left one hell of a mess. I have no idea why the first one broke; I'd only just started brewing.
 
Back
Top