Re-priming bottles?

[hockayak]

Hi all, newbie, not a pro - pease don’t kill me for being new at this.

TL;DR - can I go back and add more priming sugar?

I have been brewing the FWK from All Inn Brewing, the Mutiny Red IPA. I diluted it down from 15L to 17.5L, and made the appropriate adaptation in my expectation for the alc content. I calculated it using 2.5L of water SG. The Alc never seemed to quite get the the right point, I added a bit more sugar, still no change. The brew seemed to have stalled.

I bottled it anyway, thinking that there was a bit of sugar left in the bottle to help it carbonate/prime - so I only used one sugar tablet. Buuttt, now I go to drink one and it isn’t carbonated properly. Can I go back and add another to each bottle, shake and warm it up a bit to ‘re-prime’? Beer tastes a little sweet, can I add a tiny shred of yeast per bottle?

Any ideas why my brew might have stalled? It brewed for a month, at room temp.

 

[MHB]

You need to be very careful! Especially if the beer tastes a little sweet.
What I would do is take a bottle or two and put them somewhere warm for a couple of days and see what happens. On top of a hot water storage tank was an old favourite, as was the top of a fridge at the back where the condenser is.... Yeast will take a few days to wake up in cold weather, and a few more to make more fizz. Odds on if you had the beer in the fermenter for a month, the yeast population in the bottles will be fairly small. To tell the truth if the ferment isn’t over in 5 days something is wrong, either with the yeast, the temperature but most likely with your process.

In winter, without temperature control, at the start of the ferment heat produced by the yeast will keep the brew warm enough. As the ferment slows you get less heat and the temperature of the brew drops. Yeast hates sudden changes in temperature, if Ale yeast drops much below 16oC (varies from yeast to yeast) it stops and goes dormant, it takes a few days to wake back up and it just doesent get the chance owing to the day/night temperature changes,

Be a good idea to find some way to keep the temperature stable - temperature control is one of the most important processes in brewing.
Mark