The last several batches of beer I made had problems with carbonation after bottling, and the problem was eluding me. \u00a0I had a conversation with a fellow home brewer at work who helped me determine the cause: yeast dying before the bottling process was complete.<\/p>\n
The problem started when my yeast starters were creating very active fermentation, reducing the fermentation time and increasing the alcohol content. \u00a0I also compounded the problem by waiting 1 or 2 days longer than I should have to bottle, after the fermentation was complete (i.e. over 1 minute between bubble bursts.<\/p>\n
So in my last batch of beer (Stout), I tried something different: I saved some of the yeast I was pitching in a sanitized container, and stored it in my fridge. \u00a0As I was siphoning the wort into the bottling bucket, I added the stored yeast and the fermenting sugars to the wort. \u00a0It worked. \u00a0Only 5 days into conditioning, the bottles were producing the usual 1-2 inch head I expect.<\/p>\n
Lesson learned: the very by-product produced by yeast (alcohol) \u00a0as it consumes its food (sugar) is toxic to the yeast itself. \u00a0So carefully watch for the time when the bubbling cycles go below 1 minute. \u00a0That means your yeast is gasping, and it needs new food to continue its life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last several batches of beer I made had problems with carbonation after bottling, and the problem was eluding me. \u00a0I had a conversation with a fellow home brewer at work who helped me determine the cause: yeast dying before the bottling process was complete. The problem started when my yeast starters were creating very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-brew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bitsofgenius.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}