We have found that after our beer has been bottled for several months that it has a very large head on it when we pour. It doesn’t matter how slow we pour or how angled the glass is - it foams up like crazy. Are we doing something wrong or does this happen often with natural carbonation?
Have these bottles been in the fridge for at least a few days to force the CO2 into the beer? If not try that. Otherwise the beer is either well over carbonated or an infection has gotten hold. How does the beer taste/smell? If it tastes like beer and smells like beer then it’s most likely over carbonated.
How much beer did you prime (Finished volume)? How much priming sugar was used, did you weigh it or measure it out, the former is much more accurate.
A little more info on your bottling process would help:)
This is funny, because I just had this happen to me five minutes ago with my a Pliny clone I found in the back of the garage fridge. It was brewed probably four months ago and the five gallon batch probably had no more than 3.5 oz of sugar in it. It poured perfectly into a pint glass with a nice finger head on it. I rinsed the bottle and turned around… The head grew and overflowed the glass all over the counter. It’s crystal clear and tastes fine. Thus beer had been in the basement for a couple months before I got the garage fridge. It’s been there since with a lot of my hoppy beers. I’m confused as to why this has happened too. I have a White House honey ale that turns completely to bubbles as it pours… I would think that might have been hit with an infection.
One other thing to keep in mind and consider is ensuring the beer is absolutely at final gravity before bottling.
There is always a possibility that being impatient and thinking the beer was done it may not have been.
Bottling and carbonating is a pretty exact science. The residual yeast consumes an exact amount of added sugar to produce and exact amount of CO2 in a confined space.
Assuming you weigh out the sugar to the gram, properly mix the sugar and confirm the FG, verify the given temperature of the beer when bottling(Co2 volumes in suspension will vary given temperature) and allow the proper temp to carbonate and then refrigerate there really should be no issues and a perfect beer.
Any variation of these items or an infection will cause over/under carbonation
Is it possible that the honey in the beer allows it to keep carbonating? Every brew we have had do this has contained honey.
One common source of gushing that is often ignored is calcium oxalate, or beer stone. If Calcium is low in your brewing process, beer stone can form in the bottle, instead of the tun and kettle, and lead to gushing.
Interesting, do you have a reference or can you explain, never heard of this…
Here’s a quick one everyone should be able to access.
Interesting, although found this also as well as several other technical articles and it really appears that on a home brew scale it really shouldn’t be an issue
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Biotech-Environ/beer/water2.htm
So over or under carbonating will cause gushers??? I just can’t wrap my head around that logic. My flat beer doesn’t ever gush. Where does the chill for two days to force co2 into the beer come from?
Also I have had beerstone at the homebrew level.
Sounds like overcarbonation to me. Happens to me more often than I’d like to admit. I have a bad habit of overestimating how much beer is actually going to make it into the bottling bucket, and end up with a bit more priming sugar than intended. Mad foamage ensues.
Beer is a live product. If it sits around for months at room temp and there is stilll yeast in suspension and any fermentable sugars left the yeast will ferment and cause carbonation. Unless its a high gravity beer, in most cases, I would question why you leave it sitting around so long. Drink it fresh and young. That’s how its supposed to be consumed. Old beer usually sucks.
Thanks for that link and info. Where I live, the water has <2ppm Ca. When I first started brewing here I had beerstone like crazy on my bottles, and if cellared a long time they were often gushers. I attributed the gushing to infection, and the beerstone was a mystery. But they didn’t always taste infected so I just scratched my head. Now in the last 4 years or so I’ve been treating my water to always have >50ppm Ca; since then the beerstone and gushing are greatly reduced, maybe even gone. I need to go back and try some cellared beers but I’m guessing the beerstone was from low Ca. (of course I mostly keg now so will be hard to know for sure.)
Hmm, I would have expected it to be more of a problem among homebrewers, since calcium levels are often poorly controlled, beer is often not cold conditioned prior to bottling, and beer is rarely filtered.
Can’t comment on the Beerstones but regarding the CO2, yes, as we know there are different levels of CO2 in the beer dependent upon temperature of the beer. Colder beer will retain higher levels of CO2 than warmer beer. This is why, when priming, it is important to factor beer temp for the sugar calculation. When you take a bottle of beer that has been conditioning at 70+ for a few weeks and then open it warm there is the possibility that the bottle will gush because the CO2 has not been full absorbed into the beer (it may happen, it may not). If the beer is then refrigerated for a few days the beer will absorb the CO2 more readily and stabilize in the beer.
This is all my understanding as relayed over the years by people more knowledgeable than I. I only bottle and always have and these are also my experiences.
A couple of times I had bottles that were not gushers when opened. However, when you poured it, when it hit the glass it would turn 95% foam, which sounds like is the same thing happening here. These were also bottles that had sat around a while. When the foam turned back into beer, it was fine. Perhaps coincidence, but the two times I’ve had that happen to me they were extract batches.
I never bought into overcarbonation as the culprit because the bottles weren’t gushers and the beer was not overly carbonated. My best guess is that, over time, proteins and/or polyphenols precipitated out and generated lots of nucleation sites for the CO2. Both times it happened to me, the beers were dark (one a Southern English Brown, and the other was either a porter or stout), so I didn’t notice any obvious chill haze, but I also didn’t think to try to look for it either.
Can’t comment on the Beerstones but regarding the CO2, yes, as we know there are different levels of CO2 in the beer dependent upon temperature of the beer. Colder beer will retain higher levels of CO2 than warmer beer. This is why, when priming, it is important to factor beer temp for the sugar calculation. When you take a bottle of beer that has been conditioning at 70+ for a few weeks and then open it warm there is the possibility that the bottle will gush because the CO2 has not been full absorbed into the beer (it may happen, it may not). If the beer is then refrigerated for a few days the beer will absorb the CO2 more readily and stabilize in the beer.
This is all my understanding as relayed over the years by people more knowledgeable than I. I only bottle and always have and these are also my experiences.
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This is not how it works. When priming it is important to know the highest temperature the beer got to, as that will determine the co2 still in the beer. If it hit 72 and you bottle it at 60, it will not have magically absorbed co2 back into solution at the 60 level. The open beer on the counter overnite will not regain it’s carbonation by putting it in the fridge. Pressure is the factor you are missing.
At a given pressure, a beer at 40 will have more co2 than a beer at 70. If I have a properly carbonated lager and an ale served at 35, they will not have the same co2 level because they are the same temperature. The lager will be at a higher pressure and therefore have more co2 in solution.
Also when you are naturally carbonating a beer the co2 is being produced IN solution, not forced into solution. When the pressure in the bottle equalizes, the co2 in solution can no longer escape and remains in the beer until that pressure is released. When you chill the beer, pressure drops as temperature drops so there is no more co2 “forced” into solution. It is the drop in pressure as well as the colder beers ability to hold onto co2 which helps to “stabilize” the beer and make it easier to pour, as well as a couple other factors.