flat stout

[Dave Brown]

Hi all, just done a BIAB chocolate stout, beautiful but flat. My first go at bulk priming with malt and weighted out the malt to the calculator.Have re done some with 2 carbon drops and ok but wondered where I went wrong?

 

Is bulk priming hard to get right?

[Ralph]

how much malt did you add to how many litres of stout? Has it been kept somewhere warm enough for the secondary ferment to get up and go?

I always bulk prime. Have not had a failure yet. Seems pretty easy to me?

[Grant R Baker]

Any other changes to your bottling..? New cleaning / sterilizing product or method..?

I only ask as the last two brews I made I used a new Pink bottle cleaner, primed exactly same why as normal, but got flatter beers. Next beer is back to the old bottle cleaner agent. Won't know till next week or so.

[Dave Brown]

No changes to anything except bulk priming instead of carbonation drops

[Ralph]

So how much malt did you add for how many litres of beer? 

[Chris P]

Hi Dave, Do you brew at ambient temperatures? I only ask because up to this point (just about to hook up a temp controlled fridge) I have and the only two beers that have had weird/not much carbonation have been beers that have been too warm at one point during fermentation.

[Dave Brown]

I have a temp controlled fridge so constant at 18c

[JumpR]

I had a similar problem with my first bulk prime which was a porter (link).  I had been storing my bottles in my garage which gets quite cold overnight and upon relocating to the hot water cupboard carbonation did improve after a couple of weeks.  One aspect to note if you have been using carb drops - these give a quite high carbonation.  They say to use 2 x drops per 750ml, which by my math equates to 208gr of sugar per 20L - my brewing program told me to add 110gr of sugar per 20L...