Can I get this yeast to carb up more?

[bechard]

Gentlemen,

I feel I've made a bad judgement call. I tried one of my Pale Ale after carbing up for two weeks at 76F, and it had a decent head on it and felt like it was almost carbed up. I left the batch carbing up an additional 5 days, and then tossed them in the fridge as I did not want them to over-carb. After 24 hours, the beer I tried from the batch was less carbed than the first one I tried. Still got a hiss when I popped the cap, but almost no head formed.

If I take them back out of the fridge, will the existing yeast kick in when they reach normal carbing temps again? If so, would it help to give them a light toss to resuspend any flocculated yeast?

Thanks guys.

 

[Revvy]

They will never "over carb" unless you add more sugar than you need. Unless you have an infection, or the beer was never completely fermented, the yeast will ONLY eat the sugar you gave it at priming, and produce the volume of co2 to carb the beer based on that amount. That's how we carb to style, some beer styles are less carbed than other, so when we carbed to style, we control the amount of co2, by controlling the amount of sugar we give it. We don't worry that it will carb higher, since it really can't.

The 3 weeks at 70 that we talk about here is really just an average minimum, some beers take less, and many take more. If you added the right amount of sugar to the beer, the beer will carb, when it's ready. It's really foolproof.

If your beer isn't carbed up, just take it out of the fridge, let it warm up for a couple days, then give them a shake to kick the yeast up off the bottom. And leave them above 70 for a couple of weeks.

Then ONLY take 1-2 beers (If your beers are in 2 different casses/bottle boxes, milk crate or whatever grab 1 from each case, since even a slight change in the enviroment can contribute to just when a beer will carb, one case might be actually warmer than the other,) chill them only for a couple days and test those to see if they are carbed, BEFORE you chill the rest.

 

[bechard]

Thanks Revvy, will do. That 1-2 beer step was done with a 24 hour chill. Guess I'll just make a point of 4 week minimum. I should know better anyway, as the corn sugar was calculated to hit my co2 volume.

I'll take them out this afternoon, and give them a shake in a day or two when warmed up.

Cheers.