Beer over carbonated

[ewadz3006]

I made this batch last year and I can't find my paperwork I had, so I'm gonna do the best I can on the specifics. It was a batch from brewers best, holiday ale. I love great lakes Christmas ale so I wanted something like that. I wanted to add honey, so I did so at the end of the boil. I also added cinnamon ( at the end). Other than that I did the recipe like it calls for. Ended up with 1.06 sp. Gr. If memory serves. When I put it in the carboy for primary, it did blow over after the first day. I went two weeks in primary then two weeks. It tasted great before I added priming sugar. I syphoned it out of carboy into bottling bucket, added the sugar and bottles it. When you crack one it foams out the top like you shook it up. And tastes almost yeasty too. I'll add a video link as soon as it uploads to YouTube.

I'm just wondering what happened. I've made 4-5 batches before with no problems like this. Although I've never deviated from recipe.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dizzey]

I think either you added too much priming sugar, or the fermentation somehow wasnt finished. But at two weeks primary and (Im assuming) two weeks secondary before bottling, I think it should have been but without having done the hydrometer test you can't know for sure. The other answer is probably to do with having too much sugar/priming sugar in your beer once you bottled it. I've read that kits usually ship with more priming sugar than you need for a recipe--NorthernBrewer and BrewersFriend both have priming sugar calculators and I think the general advice is to start at 3.5 oz of dextrose/priming sugar which will give you 2.1 volumes on a 5 gallon batch, and then scale up or down depending on how carbonated you want it.

I think what might have happened is, if you're following recipes from a kit, they already scaled out the recipe to have the right amount of sugar in the beer without honey, which you added. So if you continue to follow their recipe and use their numbers, you're actually going to have extra sugar in your beer that you might not have been accounting for. Honey might take longer to ferment out than regular sugar, or might not even have completely fermented out at all depending on how healthy your yeast was, so when it comes time to add more sugar when you're bottling, the yeast goes crazy and kicks off fermenting again. I think I've read that you mostly get bottle bombs if the bottle is compromised in some way (cracked, chipped, not sealed well), otherwise a good seal will be strong enough to just force the CO2 produced back into the beer, so if this happened to you, you might see beer gush out of the bottle once the cap is cracked and the pressure is released.

I actually dont know the answer either, I'm just guessing because something similar happened to me when I made one of my first batches from a kit, the kit said use all the priming sugar (I think it was like 5 oz for a 5 gallon batch - but you leave some trub so I think I bottled about 4.5 gal) so I did, and when I cracked my bottles, they didn't spew or foam out, but there was a lot of haze in the neck of the bottle when you opened it and when you poured the beer, you got way too much head for the style, and the beer was pretty flavorless. I did some research and have been running with that assumption (too much priming sugar/not done fermenting leading to overcarbbed beer),*but Im not really sure myself.


Oh, the other thing is that it could be an infection. Apparently infections lead to characteristics like that, "gushers", and dry, over-fermented flavorless beer. Honey can apparently introduce wild yeasts and lead to an infection, but you said you boiled it, and that the wort tasted fine before bottling so the only way I could see it being an infection is if the bottles werent properly sanitized, but even then I feel like it would only affect one or two bottles.

 

[ewadz3006]

Thanks for the response. I did check the gravity after but I don't remember what it was. Im thinking I went by what the recipe said as far as where I needed to be for bottlin g. And yes it was primary two weeks and secondary additional two weeks, one month total. I used the pack that came with the kit, I put it all in.

 

[ewadz3006]

Here is the link...

https://youtu.be/TP-mXgrhvBE

It was foaming like it is in the video for 10- 15 minutes afterwards. It's still foaming ( very slowly) now 35 minutes later.

 

[jurgenph]

how much priming sugar was included?

the instructions for that kit say to use 4oz.


J.

 

[RM-MN]

I made this batch last year and I can't find my paperwork I had, so I'm gonna do the best I can on the specifics. It was a batch from brewers best, holiday ale. I love great lakes Christmas ale so I wanted something like that. I wanted to add honey, so I did so at the end of the boil. I also added cinnamon ( at the end). Other than that I did the recipe like it calls for. Ended up with 1.06 sp. Gr. If memory serves. When I put it in the carboy for primary, it did blow over after the first day. I went two weeks in primary then two weeks. It tasted great before I added priming sugar. I syphoned it out of carboy into bottling bucket, added the sugar and bottles it. When you crack one it foams out the top like you shook it up. And tastes almost yeasty too. I'll add a video link as soon as it uploads to YouTube.

I'm just wondering what happened. I've made 4-5 batches before with no problems like this. Although I've never deviated from recipe.

Thanks in advance.

it probably tastes yeasty because you are tasting the yeast. Gushers will stir up the yeast from the bottom of the bottle.

You could have an infection or it could be that there is a lot of yeast still in suspension that are becoming nucleation points for the CO2 to come out of solution. You didn't say how long this has been bottled or if there is an off flavor other than yeast. You also could have a wild yeast infection that doesn't change the flavor but will ferment what we normally consider unfermentable sugars.

 

[GHBWNY]

My only gusher episode is remotely related to yours, but for what it's worth...

At bottling, I decided to "bottle-hop" 8 out of the 50 bottles by dropping a single pellet into the bottle before capping. The effect was great, albeit you had a small amount of extra hop debris to pour around. Over time, of the 5 bottle-hopped beers remaining, 3 eventually exploded and the other 2 gushed when opened as you described. Maybe the added hop pellet caused a "hyper-nucleation" situation, but I suspect it was the fact that these hops were quite old (borderline 'cheesy') and they carried a bug with them into the beer.

 

[TomVA]

I sounds like your foaming is from too low of a surface tension in the beer.

A bottle of beer under pressure has more CO2 dissolved in the beer than a bottle at atmospheric pressure. Likewise cold beer will dissolve more CO2 than room temperature beer. When you pop the cap on a cold bottle you instantly relieve the pressure and the beer gives a surge of tiny bubbles as it releases some of the excess CO2 in solution. And as the beer slowly warms it releases more, so the beer generates a continuous stream of bubbles that gradually reduces and stops when the CO2 solubility reaches a new equilibrium at room temperature.

These little bubbles rise to the top and break. If the rate of bubble breaking (foam collapse) is equal to or faster than the rate of generation, then no foam will form. In looking at your video it looks like the bubbles are not breaking, or at least breaking very slowly, and therefore creating a foam. The foam starts fast and then slows as the rate of bubble generation slows on its way to a new equilibrium.

I doubt this is due to over carbonation since the foaming continues for a long time. I suspect your beer has too low of a surface tension which can cause the bubbles to not break. A contamination with surfactant properties can cause this. Since this foaming is not usual, it may be related to an unusual ingredient, such as the honey or cinnamon, or some other contamination such a soap residue.

TomVA

 

[ewadz3006]

it probably tastes yeasty because you are tasting the yeast. Gushers will stir up the yeast from the bottom of the bottle.

You could have an infection or it could be that there is a lot of yeast still in suspension that are becoming nucleation points for the CO2 to come out of solution. You didn't say how long this has been bottled or if there is an off flavor other than yeast. You also could have a wild yeast infection that doesn't change the flavor but will ferment what we normally consider unfermentable sugars.

I bottled this about 1 year ago now, but they did this since two weeks after bottling. I've open a few here and there all year long they are all the same.

 

[dwhite60]

Vent them. Just crack the lid enough for some pressure to release then recap them. Do this periodically until the pressure is where you want it.

Been there, done this,and it works.

All the Best,
D. White

 

[PADave]

I've had one batch do this to me. It was a brown ale and was the best brew I had made to date. They just kept getting better over time in the bottle, so I got the idea of "saving" a 12 pack. After a few months they started to go downhill taste wise and did the exact same thing. My thoughts were infection. Ended up dumping them and haven't had it happen since.

 

[Tommydee]

Just bottled my first batch yesterday. My friends that give me homebrew and also beginners always overcabonate. Looked at my fermenter and was about 4.8 gallons, think I underfilled . Did A quick internet search, used northern brewer calculator, and for my beer style (English brown) and volume, it was 3.4 oz...that's a lot less than 5 that the kit called for! Of course I don't have a scale yet, so eyeballed the volume, put about 2/3 of the bag in. I think more often than not 5 oz is too much, at least for my taste.

 

[GHBWNY]

Just bottled my first batch yesterday. My friends that give me homebrew and also beginners always overcabonate. Looked at my fermenter and was about 4.8 gallons, think I underfilled . Did A quick internet search, used northern brewer calculator, and for my beer style (English brown) and volume, it was 3.4 oz...that's a lot less than 5 that the kit called for! Of course I don't have a scale yet, so eyeballed the volume, put about 2/3 of the bag in. I think more often than not 5 oz is too much, at least for my taste.

I never use the entire 5 oz. bag of corn sugar that comes with a kit and don't know why they include that much instead of 4 oz., which is 3/4 C. which is fairly standard for an ale at ~65F (and what Palmer suggests). Even style calculators fall considerably short of 5 oz., and most often, 4 oz.. Belgians, hefes, etc. are the exception, so maybe it's easier from a manufacturing standpoint to package the standard 5 oz. bag in the event it is all needed. I used to prepare the entire 5 oz. when bottling (because the kit said so), but now the extra I save from 3 brews leaves enough to do the 4th.