IIPA, 8 months, no carbonation

Just like the title says...its been 8 months and still no carbonation. What are my options? I could add some yeast to each bottle but im not too sure of how much to add. What about carbonation drops? There is sediment in the bottom of the bottles. Prior to bottling, the brew sat completely undisturbed in the primary for 8 weeks while i was away for work. I did not add any additional yeast at bottling. I stirred up the bottles several times during the aging process to try to keep the yest in suspension. Thanks for any suggestions you guys are able to provide!

 

what temp was this in? What type of bottles...not that it should really matter. 8 months seems way too long. My 9.5% gets there in two months fairly consistently. What is your abv? How did you prime them?

 

I'm curious as well, how did you prime the bottles, it sounds as though you have enough yeast with the sediment in the bottle but no sugar? 8 months is a long time, at what temp have the bottles been sitting-hopefully not in the refrigerator???

 

are you sure you didn't use lactose or malto-dextrin to prime with? heh

 

I've only ever had one beer not carb. It was around 8%, I massively underpitched (I'm surprised it even finished), and it fermented probably around 80. My yeast were probably completely dead.

If you're positive you added the right amount/type of sugar, I'd try dropping a bit of dry yeast in each bottle and re-capping.

 

The ABV is around 9%. It was primed with corn sugar and the 12oz bottles have been sitting at 70 degrees since bottling.

 

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sounds like the yeast were dead. might have died off from the alcohol, although at 9% you should have still had a few yeasties around unless you really stressed them during primary.

i'd get some dry champagne yeast, rehydrate, add a few drops of the slurry to each bottle and re-cap. sounds like the original priming sugar is still in there, un-digested, so the champagne yeast will go to work on that. you could add a *small* amount of sugar to the slurry if you think the bottles need it (be careful tho, especially if you originally primed to the high end of what the bottles can handle).

 

What yeast? I just did. 10% IIPA with some British ale yeast my buddy brought over that said tolerance was 9%. Carbonated fine. Leaky caps?

 

I really have no idea what happened. It could have been the leaky caps but for every bottle to be like that I would find hard to believe. I used wlp007 which should have been fine for that alcohol content. I will try the champagne yeast and see if that works.

 

One way to find out is harvest the yeast from a bottle and see if you can get them in action again. If so, problem is with bottling or you forgetting to add priming sugar.

 

So i checked my notes from last october and i do not have any priming sugar listed as being added.....but that does not mean i did not add any. If i did not add any then that would explain the lack of carbonation. The ABV is also close to 10% and i used WLP 001...not WLP 007.

 

Open a bottle and taste. If it's quite sweet, add yeast. If not, add sugar and yeast.

 

Agreed. WLP007 is a pretty resilient strain. I recently cracked open an imperial stout at 10% abv and it was carbed just fine after just a few weeks.

Whatever you do to try to fix them, I'd recap with a bench capper just to be safe.

 

I ended up using wlp001, but that is still rated for high alcohol according to the white labs website. Im going to try a bottle today to see if i can taste any any sugar. It finished around. 011 so hopefully it will be noticeable. If i taste some then i will add some yeast...if no sugar taste then ill add some carb tabs.

 

I still like the idea of popping one and harvesting the yeast, as a way to test viability. Once you add that sugar, you can't take it out. It's better to eliminate the yeast as the culprit, because if you find out late that it is, and you've already added more sugar, in addition to the original priming amount, you're in trouble. Go ahead and pop one for tasting, but there's no reason not to try to build a starter out of the dregs as well.