Bottle Priming Calculators and my Heffe

Brewing Processes
1

I brewed a German Style Heffeweizen Beer.

After two week in the primary I decided to bottle today.  I fermented the beer at around 64 degrees.  The beer going into bottling bucket was already quite carbonated however the Bottle Priming calculator on BeerSmith and on Tastybrew.com called for the beer to be primed with 8.8 oz of priming sugar.  It was a 5.5 gallon batch of beer and it was around 64 degree.  OG 1.056 FG 1.013.  Tasted and smelled great almost as it was.  As I was siphoning into the bottling bucket the last gallong wouldn’t siphon.  I had to pump my auto-siphon till I got the rest of it in the bucket which leads me to believe I may have oxydized the crap out it already.

So here are my fears…

  1. Over CO2ing the beer.  The guide lines for German Heffe CO2 levels is in the high threes and low fours volumes.  As I said before the beer seems like it already had quite a bit of CO2 in it already.  So much so that when I was pumping the auto-siphon it created a thick head in the bottling bucket.

  2. Oxydation.  I’m afraid that having to pump the last gallong or less of beer into my bottling bucket I may have introduced too much O@ into the beer.  My only hope is that the yeast will scavenge the O@ as it primes and conditions the beer over the next week or two.

Has anyone here had a similar experience?

Thanks for any replies to this post.

Richie

2

That does seem like quite a bit. Depending on the type of sugar, it looks like that’s 3.9-4.1 vol of CO2. Be careful storing and opening the bottles - I’ve heard that standard-weight bottles will burst at about that point.

3

you say it seemed kind of carbonated already. Are you sure it was really done? did you take several hydrometer readings over a few days and get the same result?

For what it is worth I have had issue with my syphone to bottle bucket several times and had to work similar to what you are saying. I did not get any bad flavours.

4

I have had similar problems with the auto-siphon, particularly when there is dissolved CO2.  It tends to come out of solution and stop the flow.  No problems in the end though, but I like oat ( O@ ) in my beer.    :slight_smile:

5

I just recently did a Dunkelweizen that calls for the same volumes of CO2.  The calculators also told me to use 8.8 oz but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Finally settled for 6 oz and, after three weeks of bottle conditioning, cracked the first one the other day and was really happy with the amount of head/carbonation.

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=4001.msg76884#msg76884