troubleshooting priming sugar error

[jonahk]

I used to brew more often some years ago and just got back into it. I had a very successful all-grain brew day, great efficiency and hassle-free primary and secondary fermentation. All was going as planned until I made a stupid error. When getting ready to bottle, I racked into my bottling bucket and pitched my priming sugar into the beer without dissolving my sugar in H20 first. So it was dry sugar (5oz) stirred into my beer. I only realized that I had made this mistake after I finished capping the last bottle. I looked into the bottling bucket and there was some undissolved sugar at the bottom! Probably a few tablespoons.

A few hours later I had a chance to try to rectify this. I uncapped every bottle, and put everything back into the bucket in an effort to distribute the sugar more evenly. I then capped again. I've been worried that this mistake was not totally solved for the last few weeks and after 2 weeks in the bottle, I tried one bottle and it was fairly flat (just a tiny fizz when I opened it).

So here are my main questions:
1. Since 2 weeks is the lower limit of time for carbonation, is it possible that I did solve this problem more-or-less and just need to wait a few more weeks to know for sure? Or, given that there was barely any carbonation after 2 weeks, should I assume that things are not going well here?

2. There is obviously sugar in there somewhere, but it is probably distributed unevenly? Can I expect some bottles to be over carbonated and some not at all?

3. What would you do in this case? I imagine when I want to drink a bottle (in 4+ weeks) I would chill and then open. If it is flat, can I just add some more priming sugar to the bottle and recap for 6 weeks?? Then, occasionally I might get one that does not need that, which I can just drinks straightaway.

Thanks for your input. I feel dumb about this, and recall that in my early years of brewing I managed to make at least one small error each time until I thought I'd made all of them!

 

[CascadesBrewer]

What would you do in this case?

I would keep the bottles in a warm location and give another one a try in a week. After adding all the bottles back into the bucket, I have to think that the sugar would be reasonably well mixed in.

 

[BeerNsteadofH2O]

Give them some more time, also , you might GENTLY take each bottle, invert it several times then return them to the upright position, doing so will help redistribute any yeast or sugar that may have settled.

 

[hotbeer]

It's already bottled and capped? Just go with it. Plan for but hope there aren't bottle bombs. I've never had one but others claim they have. Even so, I store my beer where it won't be an issue if it does explodes. A cardboard box will contain the shards and plastic box will contain both shards and spilled beer.

If you have some flat beers, then hopefully they won't be too flat. It just seems like you won't know till you open them and at that time I guess you could prime one bottle and cap it. But I'd not bother with it. If I couldn't drink it, then I'd decide if I've got something for the grill I might want to marinade in the flat beer.

To open them all and try to do anything now will just be more chance of oxidation.

 

[InspectorJon]

Pouring beer from bottles back into a bottling bucket will oxidize the beer quite a bit. That is more significant for some styles than others. I have tried adding sugar directly to bottled beer that was not primed properly due to a calculation error. My plan was to uncap each bottle, add a calculated small amount of additional sugar and then recap. Each grain of sugar is a nucleation point = lots of foam immediately after dropping the sugar in the bottle. That didn't work so well.

I recently did something similar that did seem to work well, although enough time has not yet passes to sample the results. I made a water/sugar solution with the calculated amount of sugar I needed. I wanted to end up with 80 ml of solution so I put the amount of sugar I needed in a graduated cylinder (a hydrometer cylinder) and added water up to 80ml and dissolved the sugar. I then put it in a glass bowl and heated it in the microwave because that made me feel better about sanitation. Using a sanitized meat marinade injector, I withdrew 10ml of beer from each bottle and added 10 ml of sugar solution. That process worked pretty well.