Is my homebrew overcarbed?

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You will KNOW when it's overcarbed. Depending on the style, you may or may not have overcarbed it, but I had one batch that I called volcano ale because they did the whole coke and mentos thing as soon as you opened them. Use one or even two carb calculators and then average the two, that's your best bet for correct carbonation volumes.
 
As to the oversweetness you describe, do you know what your final gravity was? If you had excessive residual sugar and then added more at bottling, that would explain your "too-sweet, too-carbonated" beer.
 
The bubbles in the head are rather large. You may not have given the beer sufficient time to condition and/or not chilled long enough before opening. What was the length of time for conditioning and the temperature?
 
The bubbles in the head are rather large. You may not have given the beer sufficient time to condition and/or not chilled long enough before opening. What was the length of time for conditioning and the temperature?


I conditioned in the bottles for 2 weeks and 6 days at around 70 degrees. Then I put in the fridge for 3 days. Is that sufficient?

Also, brewing 1 gallon batches so didn't do gravity tests. Will eventually get myself a refractometer.
 
I would say you have too few bubbles.......not too many. The bubbles are large and few. An ideal head has smaller bubbles. But good head is very subjective.

H.W.
 
Give your beer at least another two weeks to condition. Save one for tasting in three months. You'll be surprised how good it has become with longer conditioning time.

A hydrometer is more accurate when alcohol is present in the sample. There are correction tables for refractometers, that will get the SG fairly close.
 
"Overcarbed" is relative. Some beers should be low to moderate carbonation, and some should be quite high. Some can be near champagne levels of carbonation. It all depends on what you're trying to achieve. Most homebrewers (especially new ones) slightly overcarb most of their beers.

If you've given the beer proper time to condition (which you pretty much have, another week or two may help, but you're probably about where you're going to be), and enough chill time to dissolve the CO2, and it feels too carbonated to you, then yes, it's probably overcarbed (relative to what you want). I find the 5 oz corn sugar per 5 gallon batch ratio that's often used with kits (or adjusted relative to other batch sizes) too be way too carbonated for my tastes, and too carbonated for most beer styles. Check an online priming sugar calculator, and factor in the actual bottled volume, not batch size (I assume 10% volume loss to yeast cake, ie for a 5 or 5.5 gallon batch, I subtract 0.5 gallons from the fermenter volume and calculate for 4.5 or 5 gallons respectively), temperature of the beer (I go by the highest that it reached during fermentation, but temp at bottling would work too), the level of CO2 you want (charts out there, but generally bottled English beers are ~1.5-2 volumes, American and German lagers/hybridgs 2.3-2.5 volumes, and 2.5-3.5 for Belgians/sours/Weizens).
 
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