flat beer

I've been having a problem with some of my beers in a 5 gallon batch being flat. It started with a couple of beers in one batch, then a few more, now it is nearly 1/4 of my last 2 batches. I sterilize my bottles by soaking them in the tub overnight in a mild bleach solution. I read in "The Joy of Homebrewing", that too much sterilant can cause this, but it's only affecting some of my bottles and I thought that the remaining bleach would evaporate as I dried the bottles.

My solution of mixing a flat beer with a carbonated beer works when I'm home, but if I'm bringing beer to freind's houses, I'd rather that all of my beers are properly carbonated.

Any ideas on how to solve the problem ?

If you're confident that the priming sugar solution is evenly mixed into your batch (are you?), then I would next look at your capper and your capping procedure to make sure you're getting a good crimp seal on all your bottles. Some cappers have a poor track record... one way to find out if you have a poor seal on your bottles is to attach a balloon or condom to the tops of your bottles and see if they inflate over time...

i know that someone will have posted this response by the time i hit send but here we go:

When you siphoned from the fermentor to the bottling bucket did you mix in the priming sugar well enough?

That could be the easiest solution to this in the future.

as far as fixxing your present beer, dump it all into a fermentor and wait awhile. then add more priming sugar and bottle. you will have to calculate how much sugar to add. clean all of your bottles again. and this should work unless you have a sh*t ton of bleach in your beer.

how long has it been in bottles?

how much sugar did you add?


***edit***

I was assuming that you do not have means to force carbonate, but you could always keg then fill bottles with the BMBF.

what kind of beer was it?

madewithchicken said:

i know that someone will have posted this response by the time i hit send but here we go:

When you siphoned from the fermentor to the bottling bucket did you mix in the priming sugar well enough?

That could be the easiest solution to this in the future.

Click to expand...

I'm fairly sure I mixed the priming sugar well, I spent a couple of minutes stirring it in.

as far as fixxing your present beer, dump it all into a fermentor and wait awhile. then add more priming sugar and bottle. you will have to calculate how much sugar to add. clean all of your bottles again. and this should work unless you have a sh*t ton of bleach in your beer.

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I had thought about that, but since most of my beer is carbonated I haven't bothered.

how long has it been in bottles?

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about 2-3 weeks

how much sugar did you add?

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5 oz corn sugar per 5 gallon batch

***edit***

I was assuming that you do not have means to force carbonate, but you could always keg then fill bottles with the BMBF.

Click to expand...

BMBF ?

what kind of beer was it?

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My pilsner is giving me the worst problem with about 1/4 of the bottles flat, So far I've only had a few red ales turn up flat on me. They were bottled about a week apart.

EngineJoe said:

then I would next look at your capper and your capping procedure to make sure you're getting a good crimp seal on all your bottles. Some cappers have a poor track record... one way to find out if you have a poor seal on your bottles is to attach a balloon or condom to the tops of your bottles and see if they inflate over time...

Click to expand...

I have the tall stand up capper from Homebrew Heaven that looks like an oversized re-loading press.

First of all, bleach is the last thing I would use as a final sanitizer with bottles, it does not evaporate that quickly and can leave weird flavors in the beer unless you rinse it out well. It's much safer to use a no-rinse sanitizer like Star San or Iodophor.

I don't think that's what causing your problem though...maybe you got a bad batch of caps, or there's something amiss with your capper or your technique. Is it possible that your capper has the wrong size bell? If 3/4 of them are carbonating then I don't think it's a priming problem. You're not boiling your caps or anything are you? Or maybe old caps? The balloon trick that EngineJoe suggested on some freshly primed bottles will tell you for sure if some of them are leaking out CO2...just throwing out ideas here.

I had the same problem years ago and traced it to the caps. Once all the caps from that bag were gone my problems were too! Granted I was only losing one in 7 or 8

I would go buy another bag of different caps and see if that makes a difference... You could also buy some plastic bottles... I switched mainly because they are bigger and thus less bottles to fill.

ifishsum said:

First of all, bleach is the last thing I would use as a final sanitizer with bottles, it does not evaporate that quickly and can leave weird flavors in the beer unless you rinse it out well. It's much safer to use a no-rinse sanitizer like Star San or Iodophor.

Click to expand...

I use bleach for all my bottles. I rinse, dry, store, then rinse right before use. Works great.

I'm now 90% sure that it's my capper. The last few times I bottled I noticed that some of the caps didn't seat right on the bottles and had to press them twice. And the last 2 batches have only had a few flat bottles. So it looks like I'll be buying a new capper before I bottle again.