umdcrm
New Member
My room mate started doing some home brewing with a Mr. Beer back in March and has done a few batches with it. Since then, we've upgraded to using a local brew shops kit and putting together our own recipes. We've had some issues with the batches made from Mr. Beer though and I want to make sure that we leave behind our issues before moving on:
The main issue we've been having is with carbonation, we can't seem to get a consistent level of it in the Mr. Beer batches. For example, in the last batch we did a nut brown where we used two different type of bottles for bottling: The 1 liter PET bottles that came with the kit and brown glass bottles from old cases. Every bottle was sanitized, however the caps weren't. We bottle primed using carb tabs, adding the tabs in before the beer in a majority of the bottles. After capping, they sat in a dark cabinet at room temperature for about a week. After the week, my roommate opened one of the glass bottles and was nearly blinded with foam (Okay, it wasn't that bad but it was heavily carbonated). Since then we've had mixed levels of carbonation ranging from nearly flat to nearly bombs. The plastic bottles all seem to have carbonate fine, but we've had a mixture of successes from the glass. Is it possible this a capping issue? The other thing I was thinking is that because there is a similar headspace in the plastic and glass but the plastic has a much larger volume of beer that CO2 goes into solution faster than with glass. Also, the batch was in primary for only a week or so. We have a batch of octoberfest in primary in a carboy right now. It's been sitting for almost 3 weeks now, and looks like it's getting ripe for bottling. We're going to be doing alot of documentation with this batch in order to identify a pattern, but it would be helpful if anyone has tips. We WILL be batch priming the Octoberfest.
The main issue we've been having is with carbonation, we can't seem to get a consistent level of it in the Mr. Beer batches. For example, in the last batch we did a nut brown where we used two different type of bottles for bottling: The 1 liter PET bottles that came with the kit and brown glass bottles from old cases. Every bottle was sanitized, however the caps weren't. We bottle primed using carb tabs, adding the tabs in before the beer in a majority of the bottles. After capping, they sat in a dark cabinet at room temperature for about a week. After the week, my roommate opened one of the glass bottles and was nearly blinded with foam (Okay, it wasn't that bad but it was heavily carbonated). Since then we've had mixed levels of carbonation ranging from nearly flat to nearly bombs. The plastic bottles all seem to have carbonate fine, but we've had a mixture of successes from the glass. Is it possible this a capping issue? The other thing I was thinking is that because there is a similar headspace in the plastic and glass but the plastic has a much larger volume of beer that CO2 goes into solution faster than with glass. Also, the batch was in primary for only a week or so. We have a batch of octoberfest in primary in a carboy right now. It's been sitting for almost 3 weeks now, and looks like it's getting ripe for bottling. We're going to be doing alot of documentation with this batch in order to identify a pattern, but it would be helpful if anyone has tips. We WILL be batch priming the Octoberfest.
