Poor Carbonation Pale Ale

[JOG]

I'm having a problem with carbonation for the first time, my batch #23. It's a basic partial boil extract pale ale fermented with Denny's 1450, aerated with pure o2. Two weeks in primary, 3 weeks in secondary, 2 weeks in bottles. Right now it's beautiful and crystal clear... just no carbonation at all. I get a slight psst when I open the bottle, but no head and no carbonation and no yeast at the bottom of the bottle. I'm fairly certain I added the priming sugar: gravity before bottling was around 1.007 and is at 1.010 now.

It was crystal clear coming out of secondary, was there not enough yeast?
It's been sitting in my walkout basement in bottles for two weeks at around 66-68F, same condition that I fermented it at.

The best advice I've found in the forums is to wait it out and hope for the best - well, I need to have this ready for a brew club event in 10 days. If all else fails, I'll force carbonate a 2 liter bottle. I'm really disappointed right now because I have a few 1 liter flip-top bottles custom labeled for the event.

Any idea what went wrong?

 

[ETCS]

The only thing I would say is you have to have patience. 3 weeks at 70 degrees - minimum.

 

[JOG]

I ended up force carbonating some of the batch for the club event, which worked fine. The beer was still very disappointing - it was thin and phenolic. My current theory is the use of pure o2 was inappropriate for this lower gravity beer. The OG should have been around 1.039 (calculated - I did not measure) and with the FG at 1.007, that's 84% attenuation. The attenuation for Denny's 1450 is stated to be 74-76%. Either my math is off, or it over attenuated. Even after I added the priming sugar and increased the FG to 1.010, that still leaves it at 76% attenuation - not enough to wake up the yeast and carbonate the beer properly.

This over attenuation left the beer thin and somewhat flavorless, allowing some of the flaws to shine through. Can over attenuation also cause a phenolic off-taste?

 

[NordeastBrewer77]

I'm not sure of the over attenuation question, but two weeks isn't really long enough to say the beer isn't carbed, especially because you're bottle conditioning lower that 70*. Also, how long did you chill the bottle(s) before trying? It takes a couple of days in the fridge for the co2 to properly dissolve into the liquid.
My guess is your off flavors are from fermentation and not something that happened in the bottle? What temps did you ferment the beer at?

 

[Marathon06]

I'm not sure of the over attenuation question, but two weeks isn't really long enough to say the beer isn't carbed, especially because you're bottle conditioning lower that 70*. Also, how long did you chill the bottle(s) before trying? It takes a couple of days in the fridge for the co2 to properly dissolve into the liquid.
My guess is your off flavors are from fermentation and not something that happened in the bottle? What temps did you ferment the beer at?

I hope this is the case since I have a similar situation. Two weeks in the bottle at 66-68* and the beer was not carbonated. I'm letting it go another week but do I need to get it to 70*? I had some temperature variations when I fermented but its been between 66-72* for about 4 weeks.