Adding more carbonation during secondary fermentation

[Ev0151]

Hello folks.

I'm brewing lager and i bottled it 3 weeks ago. now last time i over carbonated with carbonation drops so i thought this time id use less drops so i only used 1 drop in a 750ml bottle.

Now just earlier i opened a bottle to check progress and it was pretty dead - no gassy bubbles and after 30 seconds in a glass it was dead.


My question is that i have another 25 750ml bottles like this - can i open the bottle after 3 weeks and add another carbonation drop and expect results or am i just wasting my time? The beers have another 3 weeks of secondary fermentaion left.

 

[Clementine]

Absolutely, I have done this one myself, an early brew I made I messed up the math on converting to grams (Aussie living in American always having to convert) and only had half the bottling sugar after I realized this I opened them up and added the other half. If they are completed finishing carbing. Remember you are releasing a small amount of CO2 from the head space of the bottle and you just need to compensate for that.

Get a 5ml syringe calculate using on line carb calculator how much sugar you need to add to get where you want to be. I would suggest adding one more volume of C02. So then mix this much sugar with 5ml x (how many bottles you have) of water and boil to sanitize. Then cool and shoot 5ml of the sugar solution into the bottles and recap. Mind your sanitation don't uncap all the bottles just do one or two at a time.

The hard thing is that carb tabs don't allow you to add just a little more. So switch to doing batch priming in the future, much more reliable and much easier, when I first started I kept forgetting to drop carb tabs in bottles.... I think that is because toward the end of a bottling session the beer count was getting high, my wife suggested that I drank more than I bottled! hmmm Homebrew!

Clem