Low carbonation in your homebrew?

Going all grain has certainly produced beers with bolder and more complex flavors, however we have had very inconsistent carbonation in our last 2 home brews. The good news is there are easy ways to try and correct the low carbonation in your homebrew and hopefully salvage for enjoyment. It’s no fun to dump your hard work down the drain.

Ten days after bottling our Chocolate Irish Stout, the beer had very little carbonation. Researching the problem in John Palmer’s How to Brew, he recommends 2 things that have helped our Stout: (1) The beer needs more time. We are finding that we need to have a bit more patience before cracking open those home brews. I think standard for us will be a minimum of two weeks moving forward. (2) Shaking the bottles and moving to a warmer place to get the yeast back into suspension. 30 days later, the beer is picking up some carbonation and now has a nice tan head.

Our Rye Pale Ale has been less cooperative. Opening two beers from the same batch is yielding very different results. One beer (see the beer on the left) has great carbonation, while another will be uncarbonated and rather sour (see the beer on the right). The carbonated beers have great flavor and are among one of our best brews. But its like playing roulette – but nobody has died yet. We tried the 2 fixes above with no success so we have identified the problem to probably be related to 1 of 3 things.

1. Incomplete mixing of the priming sugar. Before bottling we added the priming sugar water and really did not stir it around at all so as to not introduce oxygen into the beer. Our theory is that the beers that are coming out with good carbonation were perhaps the first ones to get bottled (more priming sugar), and the ones without carbonation got very little priming sugar. The folks over at HomeBrewTalk have some good info on this.
2. Some bottles were not sanitized properly. Some of our bottles we sanitized in the dishwasher and some we sanitized by hand. When sanitizing in the dishwasher, we do clean with detergent first and then sanitize with hot water. We believe there may have been soap residue on some of the bottles causing bad head retention – however, still does not necessarily account for sour taste in bad beers. See our post on using the dishwasher for more info.
3. We had a guest “capper” while Brett was out of town. I was filling bottles and he was struggling a bit with the capper – has never home brewed. Perhaps some of the bottles were not sealed tight enough allowing oxygen into the bottle and thus infecting some of the bottles (could be the reason for the sour taste). We like to think this is the main culprit – because it’s easier to blame someone else for your mistakes. However, in all likelihood, this one falls on the homebrewer, not the friend.