Sour Scourge!

[franknbrews]

That's a good call on the temps.

Also, a 4 week primary is pretty quick for a 1.092 beer. Are you checking your OG to make sure they're all stable before bottling? And even if stable, a high gravity beer would likely benefit from some add'l bulk aging prior to bottling anyway.

How long have the other beers been bottled (the ones that are flat)?

Flat ones were 1.080 and 1.060 respectively and both stabilized nicely in the 1.01x range, both were in primary for around a month and the 1.080 in the secondary for two-three weeks in addition. They've both been in the bottles for two months or longer.

 

[franknbrews]

Pitching cold wouldn't cause you to have excess acetaldehyde but a colder winter might leave your fermenting area colder than you think and a cold end to the ferment can leave acetaldehyde. Instead of bottling tonight, move your fermenter somewhere warm for another 3 days to a week or more and maybe the yeast will clean it up.

That could also be why your beers aren't carbonating, your storage area may be colder than what you had for previous batches and the yeast just went dormant. You might move those bottles to a warmer area of put some kind of heater where they are for a couple weeks and see if you can wake the yeast up.

My closet is the fermenter area and the storage area, it is pretty much always 70 degrees even on the coldest days. Good call about holding off on the bottling, the secondary is full to the neck, but there is plenty of bubble action still going so I might as well let that play out for a while.

 

[franknbrews]

I cracked another sour porter today and I'm not impressed. I think they are getting worse, more vinegary. I've officially decided that I'd rather spare my bottling equipment than this beer. My plan is to siphon (with my already contaminated siphon) some of the bourbon beer into a handful of 22oz bottles (with corn sugar in them) just for the hell of it and dump the rest. I'd rather move on to a new brew that waste any more bottling equipment and bottles and time bottling a beer that has the same symptoms as the other ill-fated beers in my closet.