I have always waited two weeks after bottling to drink my beer. Do I need to wait that long? About how many days in do you think I could put these bottles in a fridge and still have them ready?
I bottled my batch Saturday in 750ml bottles. And 1 2l growler. It’s been a while since I made beer and I use the carbonation drops. The beers look fairly clear now. Do you think they’re finished?
How long is a piece of string? It’s like you say…too many variables to ever know for certain. But I generally wait a week, then try one. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
No hard and fast rule as carbonation is dependent on so many variables.
When I bottled, I would add 1 beer to the fridge and sample it when it reached serving temperature. If this still seemed under-carbed, I would wait a few days and try again. Once I hit the carbonation level I was looking for, I would stock the fridge. Not a great answer, but it worked for me.
Back when I bottled, I would have one bottle in a plastic bottle, so I could tell when it was hardened up. I would leave it a little short of a full bottle, squeeze it a bit to push out most of the O2, and wait for the shape to return by CO2 production. Then when sufficiently hard to the squeeze, I would chill it and try it. Most of the glass bottles would be ready at that point, too, but I would usually give them a little more time, just to be more sure.
Hey all that looks super familiar. (Everything is basically just re-pasted and linked from my blog).
[emoji106]. The techniques are beneficial. I probably fall in the Charlie Bamforth camp: very sensible approach.