My latest brew tastes awesome. I'm stoked with it!
It's just flat.
This was my first attempt at using a secondary fermenter - I made a nut brown ale (partial mash) and had it in the primary for a week, then secondary for 2 weeks. No sanitation issues, much less sediment in the bottles than normal, all looked great. I think I may have gone wrong here - the last couple of days in the secondary, I dropped the temp to like 2C in the fridge - someone had told me to drop the temp at the end, but maybe this was wrong...?
I bottled it mostly in my new Tap-a-Draught kit, making 3 x 6L PET bottles and 4 glass tallies with the left overs, and used dextrose to prime the big ones - measured by weight, had done the sums based on John Palmer's How to Brew instructions so thought that would've been ok, and then used my thrower (I've used it before heaps of times) for the tallies.
I waited a month, which has always been enough time for carbonation (the OG was like 1038) and tried a tallie - delicious, just no sign of carbonation whatsoever. I thought I might've forgotten to prime that bottle, so I hooked up the Tap-a-draught in the fridge as per instructions, and put 2 soda bulbs into my supposedly primed beer.
It came outta there only slightly carb'd, so I added another bulb, and it was like about as carbonated as a warm english ale. Then after about 8 glasses (the thing's still 2/3 full) it totally ran outta steam and wouldn't even push beer out the nozzle - so I added yet another bulb! This brings it up to roughly normal carbonation.
My only conclusion is that originally I must've totally mis-primed, OR that somehow in the secondary my yeast died. My main suspicion is the low temp before bottling, BUT I did let it come back up to room temp to bottle.
*sigh*
Any thoughts? Other experiences with Tap-a-draught? My impression was that you could prime with sugar and use 2 bulbs per bottle, but alternatively (and supposedly not as good) you could use 4 bulbs per bottle and skip the priming. Which sounds like what I've done inadvertently...
It's just flat.
This was my first attempt at using a secondary fermenter - I made a nut brown ale (partial mash) and had it in the primary for a week, then secondary for 2 weeks. No sanitation issues, much less sediment in the bottles than normal, all looked great. I think I may have gone wrong here - the last couple of days in the secondary, I dropped the temp to like 2C in the fridge - someone had told me to drop the temp at the end, but maybe this was wrong...?
I bottled it mostly in my new Tap-a-Draught kit, making 3 x 6L PET bottles and 4 glass tallies with the left overs, and used dextrose to prime the big ones - measured by weight, had done the sums based on John Palmer's How to Brew instructions so thought that would've been ok, and then used my thrower (I've used it before heaps of times) for the tallies.
I waited a month, which has always been enough time for carbonation (the OG was like 1038) and tried a tallie - delicious, just no sign of carbonation whatsoever. I thought I might've forgotten to prime that bottle, so I hooked up the Tap-a-draught in the fridge as per instructions, and put 2 soda bulbs into my supposedly primed beer.
It came outta there only slightly carb'd, so I added another bulb, and it was like about as carbonated as a warm english ale. Then after about 8 glasses (the thing's still 2/3 full) it totally ran outta steam and wouldn't even push beer out the nozzle - so I added yet another bulb! This brings it up to roughly normal carbonation.
My only conclusion is that originally I must've totally mis-primed, OR that somehow in the secondary my yeast died. My main suspicion is the low temp before bottling, BUT I did let it come back up to room temp to bottle.
*sigh*
Any thoughts? Other experiences with Tap-a-draught? My impression was that you could prime with sugar and use 2 bulbs per bottle, but alternatively (and supposedly not as good) you could use 4 bulbs per bottle and skip the priming. Which sounds like what I've done inadvertently...
