Not getting enough carbonation

[crossmr]

For some reason my last two bottles didn't happen.

I left them 4 days again, still the same temperature in the house. I had picked them up and they felt hard. Put them in the fridge last night, went to open them today and the first one suddenly felt soft. The other one felt hard still , so I opened the hard one, but it had some pretty weak carbonation.

Any thoughts on "Saving" these bottles? It's a hassle to import the extract here, so I don't like to waste any. I've read that only 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar is enough to carbonate, so could I let it warm back up, toss in a couple tablespoons of fresh sugar and some fresh yeast and see if it kicks off again?

and I'll start some new gingerale this weekend and shorten the time on it.

 

[joshesmusica]

if you just let it warm back up, it should start carbonating again. it's like cold crashing a beer, they still carbonate afterward.
actually this is one of the reasons with homemade soda that you don't want to say take the bottles out to a picnic or something unless you have a cooler, the yeast will soon wake up again and start consuming again.
to be honest it sounds like you're making this more difficult than it has to be. i usually leave more head space than you would see in commercial sodas, and then squeeze that out. this just helps to ensure that it's finished when the pressure is rock hard. again, just test your rock hardness against an unopened, store-bought bottle of soda. once it's at that level, refrigerate for at least 2 days. you should be getting consistent results if you're using the same ingredients and it's sitting at the same temp. it's only a couple of days to wait. don't get impatient! my house was sitting around 21-22 and i was getting my ginger ale carbed in 24 hours.

 

[crossmr]

if you just let it warm back up, it should start carbonating again. it's like cold crashing a beer, they still carbonate afterward.
actually this is one of the reasons with homemade soda that you don't want to say take the bottles out to a picnic or something unless you have a cooler, the yeast will soon wake up again and start consuming again.
to be honest it sounds like you're making this more difficult than it has to be. i usually leave more head space than you would see in commercial sodas, and then squeeze that out. this just helps to ensure that it's finished when the pressure is rock hard. again, just test your rock hardness against an unopened, store-bought bottle of soda. once it's at that level, refrigerate for at least 2 days. you should be getting consistent results if you're using the same ingredients and it's sitting at the same temp. it's only a couple of days to wait. don't get impatient! my house was sitting around 21-22 and i was getting my ginger ale carbed in 24 hours.

That's what I did with both bottles. I put the sugar, extract and yeast, water with about an inch of head space, and rotate/shake gently to disolve the sugar. Then I take the cap off and squeeze the water up to the top and put the cap on. Did it to both. They both expanded out, and were left for 4 days. At the end of 4 days I tossed them in the fridge for 24 hours. This is what I did last time and both turned out perfect, this time, not so much. One was midly carbonated, the other had nothing in it at all. Like it was just doing nothing for the last 4 days.

 

[joshesmusica]

sounds like it could be the yeast then.

 

[crossmr]

sounds like it could be the yeast then.

Same yeast, it's been kept in the fridge, I'll give another bottle a try.

I'm going to toss some yeast and sugar in some warm water and see if it's gone off. Hope not.
Take me nearly two weeks to replace it.

 

[joshesmusica]

is it still the bread yeast? dry yeast i'm guessing? the thing with yeast is that it needs some nutrients as well when it's going to eat up those simple sugars. just like humans, they can't get long-lasting energy from simple sugars, they need some complex proteins and things of that nature to be really effective. it's why yooper mentioned that they seem to work better in ginger ale, because there's more nutrients in that. so you may just overwhelm your yeast with just simple sugars. though i would expect that for just carbing up, they should do the trick no matter what. do you rehydrate the yeast before you pitch it in? i believe that even in bread making you take the wet ingredients to rehydrate the yeast before adding in the dry stuff.

 

[crossmr]

It's the same yeast I use to make bread, Fleischmann's active dry. It worked before, but I just did a test and it seems to have gone off, I'll have to order some more in before I can try again.

 

[crossmr]

While I'm waiting to get some Red star from Amazon (first bag they sent my reshipper had a hole in it, so now I gotta wait for another one), can't find the 2 pound bricks of fleischman's on amazon.

I tried some local active dry yeast here in Korea. Carbonated up fantastic..
problem is it tastes like crap. The yeast really altered the flavor. Even the stuff I had go bust and not carb up properly tastes better than this.

So local yeast is definitely out unless I can find someway to compensate for the flavor.