Bottle Now?

[McLovinBeast57]

Hey guys,

I'm brewing some caribou slobber and I was supposed to bottle today. I had it in the primary for 2 weeks and had to move it to secondary because of a crack in the carboy..

After about a week in the secondary, the airlock started bubbling again about every 20 seconds. I'm going to assume this is just due to off-gassing because I had it at a pretty stable FG prior to the transfer. My question is:

Is it okay to bottle while it's off-gassing? I'm obviously trying to avoid bottle bombs lol


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[MrHadack]

If your gravity is stable, you should be fine. Airlock activity can mean different things.

When the activity started, did the temperature of the beer or ambient temperature in the room rise at all?

 

[kh54s10]

Take another gravity reading and if it is the same as before you are ok to go. Often temperature of atmospheric pressure changes will cause the bubbles.

 

[McLovinBeast57]

If your gravity is stable, you should be fine. Airlock activity can mean different things.

When the activity started, did the temperature of the beer or ambient temperature in the room rise at all?

I don't believe so, it has gotten a bit warmer out and it went from a thick glass carboy to a plastic bucket but I don't know how much that would affect the temp.

I basically just don't want all the extra co2 to create a mess haha


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[NTXBrauer]

Take another gravity reading and if it is the same as before you are ok to go. Often temperature of atmospheric pressure changes will cause the bubbles.

^^^This....I am sure it is ready for the bottle but no harm in confirming. Cheers!

 

[MrHadack]

I don't believe so, it has gotten a bit warmer out and it went from a thick glass carboy to a plastic bucket but I don't know how much that would affect the temp.

I basically just don't want all the extra co2 to create a mess haha

Like the other people said: if your gravity reading is still stable, go for it.

Beer has natural amounts of CO2 dissolved in it from the fermentation process; not all of it escapes. As the beer warms up more CO2 will come out of solution so you may see airlock activity that isn't related to direct fermentation. This is why a lot of priming sugar / carbonation calculators ask for the temperature of the beer.

SIDE NOTE:
When carbonation calculators like this one ask for the temperature of the beer, what you should enter is the warmest temperature the beer has reached after completely finishing fermentation because that will help determine the amount of CO2 still dissolved in the beer. For example, let's say you fermented at 68F, and then raised the temp to 74F for a couple days after it was done fermenting. Residual CO2 leaves the beer when the temp goes up. Then, on bottling day, the beer was back down to 68F. You'd want to enter 74F as the beer's temperature because CO2 left solution when it was at that temp and naturally it doesn't go back in when the temp goes back down.