gushing bottles

[James Lawson]

Hey guys,

I know this has been addressed elsewhere but I thought it would be good to get some feedback specific to my situation.

I occasionally get gushing bottles. This is a major pain in the ass because it disturbs the yeast cake at the bottom of the bottle and I get that funny yeasty mouthfeel which ruins the beer. This is particularly frustrating for my beers that are supposed to have a really clean feel to them. These are also beers which I tend to carbonate highly.

For instance, the beer I am drinking now is a clean pale ale made with 3:1 pils:munich, a smidgen of medium crystal, nz hallertau, and US05. It was bottle conditioned for three months before cold conditioning for a month. It was supposed to be totally awesome and I cracked it today to celebrate Oktoberfest. But it gushed and the yeast cake broke up and infested my crystal clear beer. It tastes delicious otherwise with no off tastes, so I don't know if infection could be to blame. It is pretty highly carbonated with a very much heaped teaspoon of dextrose per bottle. Not every bottle of this brew has gushed.

I also have a lager that I've bottle-lagered which has done this a couple of times, also much to my frustration.

Any ideas?

[Mike Neilson]

How bigger bottles and how bigger teaspoon? Was the final gravity stable while warm for a few days? What was the FG?

[bart]

I think you're just adding too much sugar man. Do you really need a beer that fizzy? It's not champagne! Add less sugar. Also since you report that some bottles gush and some don't, you probably need to get a more consistent way of measuring your sugar per bottle.

For this batch, try cooling the beer down as much as you can prior to opening it. Like 2 degrees C.

Also I've heard that people who use gelatin to fine in secondary report a more solid yeast cake in the bottles that is less prone to be disturbed during opening / pouring. Personally I don't use gelatin cos I don't like the idea of putting ground up animal carcass into my beer!

[JR]

You really need to bulk prime to get consistant carbonation.

[Barbara Joppa]

I do a bulk prime too. 3/4 cup dextrose dissolved into 1 cup water. Boil for 4-5 minutes (lid on) and cool to room-ish temp. add this to your 20-24L beer then bottle.

[JR]

or if you want to get all geeky about it you can use a pitching rate calculator and put in the volume of beer you have, the temp it was fermented at and how many volumes of co2 you want in your beer. That way you can lightly carb your english ales and carb the buggery out of your wheat beers.

Question for anyone that knows...

When they ask for the fermentation temp in the pitching rate calculator do they want the temp you fermented at or the warmest it got, say during a d-rest after fermentation?

I understand that it's to calculate how much co2 is already in your beer from when it fermented and that solubility decreases with temp. For that reason I tend to think that they want the highest temp your beer got to... but since I derived that answer myself it could easily be entirely wrong... your thoughts?

[denimglen]

Pitching rate calculators are for pitching volumes of yeast, I think what you're referring to is a carbonation chart/calculator.

When they ask for the fermentation temp in the pitching rate calculator do they want the temp you fermented at or the warmest it got, say during a d-rest after fermentation?

I've read that it's the temp at bottling, but I would go with the highest temp after the bulk of fermentation is done, I doubt there would be much CO2 reabsorbation unless the container holding the beer was closed to the atmosphere.

[JR]

"Pitching rate calculators are for pitching volumes of yeast, I think what you're referring to is a carbonation chart/calculator"

doh... must be getting close to the end of the week...

[Dougal]

After recent problems with overcarbonation back when I started cold-crashing, I'd say there are sometimes exceptions to this. I was using the D-rest temp (24C) to calculate priming sugar, but I'd crashed the beer down to 3C for several days before bottling. I'm sure the beer was finished but the results were pretty gushy (thankfully not explosive).

I fixed it by either crashing over a shorter time (less than 24 hours) and using the D-rest temp, or cold conditioning for a couple of weeks and using the beer temp at bottling.

[Richard Jack]

Ok, I don't quite understand what you're saying here Dougal. Do you mean that for calculating the priming sugar after a cold crash, you should use the cold crash temperature even if the bottles will be allowed to warm back up to ambient temperature? Sorry if this is a stupid question... Just pretty curious because I'm crash cooling right now :)

[Dougal]

Other's experience may differ, but when I crash chill for a day or so, like Denim says I use the warmest recent fermentation temperature before chilling to calculate the amount of sugar to bulk prime with. The theory being that the beer hasn't had time to absorb CO2 back into solution.

What I was meaning is that this changes when you've been chilling for a few days, and it certainly changes if you're cold conditioning for one or more weeks. In these cases the beer has more CO2 in solution which reabsorbed at the lower temperature, and you need less sugar to prime because of this, so you use the actual temperature of the beer at the time of bottling.

There's a good discussion on crash chilling on this forum a while ago if you can find it.

[Richard Jack]

Ah cool, sorted - I'm doing it right after all! Thanks for the help, and the prompt answer, I haven't cold crashed before and thought I might have overlooked something.
Cheers.