Resetting sugar levels

[nameless]

I bottled about 9 gallons worth of beer that spent a while in a cask, but no bottles carbonated at all, not even the slightest hiss. Yes, I know beyond a doubt that I actually did add sugar to it. My best but still skeptical guess is that I didn't pick up any yeast from the cask while siphoning.

My plan is to gently dump all the bottles into a large fermenter, pitch yeast to get the repopulate the yeast and reset the sugar level, reprime, and rebottle.

So my questions...should I mix in additional sugar to produce more yeast? There should be ~7oz of unfermented sugar in there now. Culture yeast before pitching or just dump the three packs of dry yeast I picked up?

 

[NTXBrauer]

How long was your beer in the bottle? What type of yeast did you use? Priming sugar? What temps were the bottles held at for conditioning?

 

[nameless]

It's been the bottles for a couple months now The yeast used to ferment was Wyeast's Pacman, and I had a good fermentation with FG falling a point below my target. Transferred about 4.5 gallons to the bottling bucket and thoroughly combined with 3.5oz of sucrose (boiled for a few minutes with water). Once empty, I repeated for the remaining 4.5 gallons. I'm completely baffled as to what happened. I thought maybe one half had yeast while the other didn't, but after a good sampling of bottles, no carbonation at all. It spent about 2-3 months in the cask and was the second batch of beer to be aged there. The first only spent a couple days.

 

[pdxal]

Even beer that appears crystal clear still has a large population of yeast still present unless it has been filtered with a very fine filter. If the beer was super high alcohol, or in fermentor for months, additional yeast might be needed at bottling, otherwise it just needs time, sugar, right temperatures. 3.5oz cane sugar will get you about 2.4-2.5vol CO2 unless something has gone wrong.

 

[NTXBrauer]

It is strange you have no carbonation at all. How high is your ABV. It is possible the yeast cannot survive the high alcohol level. I also assume you bottle conditioned at room temperature.

Another thing you might double check is your capper or the bottle caps used. Do you have a good seal on all the bottles? Give a bottle a shake and hold it under water to see if any gas escapes.

In answer to your question, I would not add any additional sugar. Just make sure the yeast you pitch will thrive in the beer based on ABV. Good luck!

 

[nameless]

It's getting even more baffling. I'm consolidating it all now to repitch. I've dumped about 30 bottles and came across one random bottle that was fully carbonated and about five that let out a really small amount of gas. I tried the shake and dip method with no bubbles as far as I can tell, good idea though.

I don't think it's the bottles or caps/capper as I bottled another batch the following day and those are fine, and it's a quite random assortment of bottles with some grolsch bottles mixed in there. There is indeed a considerable amount of yeast at the bottom of every bottle, so I'm gently mixing it in before dumping. I'll pitch new yeast, let it sit in the fermenter for a couple days, prime and bottle.

This is really getting to me...pdxal might have it with yeast that's too old as it was sitting for a while.

I think the one carbonated bottle was a warning and gift from above, because I actually didn't pour myself a beer before starting to dump all the bottles...

UPDATE: I'm going with providence...as I completed the beer that was carbonated, shortly before finishing the dump, I found another carbonated one to drink.