Help! Vigorous foaming at priming stage

[lauralizz]

I am following a recipe from my Grandma's old Brewing book which has a limited amount of instructions to say the least, so I've been visiting this site pretty much every day to clarify different steps on my path to my first ever homebrew.

I am brewing 1 gallon of standard dark ale with 'real ale yeast'. The recipe said to leave the wort in the fermenter for 1 week, then add 2oz of cane sugar and bottle. I thought this was a little much but I've never done it before, so the time came and I added the sugar and the fermenter went nuts with froth - just as much as it did the day I put it in there!

I assumed the fermentation must not have actually finished, and left it for another week. Today, I decided to look into more detail about the amounts of priming sugar to add etc, so I followed the calculator that someone had posted up and added 1.3 oz of liquid malt extract, believing this would be gentler but sufficient to carbonate the bottles.

Same thing again - my fermenter has foamed up like it's starting all over again. I wouldn't be so worried, but I was trying to make the beer as a Christmas present for my dad and I'm running out of time for the bottles to condition etc (it's only 4 weeks tomorrow till Christmas) so anyone got any advice or know what the hell is going on with it?

I don't want to rush it obviously - despite the deadline, I'd rather have a good batch of beer a week late than have all the bottles explode and leave me and my dad with nothing after all my hard work.

Any comments would be appreciated, thanks.

 

[3PegBrew]

Your steps are confusing. Can you clarify a few things?
1) you added sugar and or malt extract after the fermentation had already been completed?
2) are you aware that any additional sugar added to your fermentor after fermrntation will cause the yeast to kick back into action?
3) if you are bottling, i hope you are going to siphone into a new container. Right?

 

[unionrdr]

It most likely wasn't done fermenting at only one week. Use a hydrometer to make sure it's done before priming & bottling.

 

[estricklin]

At 1 week I wouldn't say for sure if your beer was done fermenting, but it most likely is now, but as mentioned above a hydrometer reading is never a bad idea.

How long did you wait before you tried to bottle after adding the priming sugar?

 

[Philistine]

Did you dissolve the sugar in water before adding it to the beer?

 

[unionrdr]

^^I thought about that myself. Adding the sugar as is would create nucleation points.

 

[3PegBrew]

I know what I'm doing this weekend.....

Grabbing some yeast starters and adding undissolved sugar to it.....

Makes me want to watch Mr. Wizard.

 

[lauralizz]

Hey thanks for your replies,

I added malt extract dissolved in water (boiled for 15 minutes) instead of priming sugar. I read it's supposed to give a more even carbonation.

Anyway, I decided at the time that I couldn't really wait for advice and bottled it within about half an hour of my post. It turned out perfect.

I lived in fear of my bottles exploding for the first week haha, but nothing went wrong.

Yeah, a hydrometer's probably a good idea - I made it all on the cheap though, and with all the things I had to buy like a bottle capper etc, it was already the most expensive Christmas present I made.

Thanks for your input though guys!