I brewed a porter and red ale from TrueBrew, purchased outside yeast (safebrew ale 05 for porter i think, ans whyeast irish red) followed all instructions to the T and the red ale is super over carbonated, and the portee is over carbed and slightly sour and no actual flavor…any tips for a new learning brewer, aside from better sterilization practices.these photos are just after just under 3 weeks in the bottle.
Sounds like you have an infection. How do you handle cleaning and sanitization?
Did you just dump in the full 5oz of corn sugar to prime the bottles, or did you calculate how much you need based on an online calculator like this:
The standard 5 oz is generally too much sugar for the carbonation level you want, and can lead to really fizzy beer.
Also, did you confirm that you were at a stable final gravity before packaging. You want 2-3 days of successive readings at the same gravity to be sure that fermentation is finished.
The consistency of the bubbles in the left picture along with your description makes me think sanitation, too.
What did you use for bottles? How did you clean/sanitize them? I have found that Star-san by itself isn’t enough to handle 50 bottles if I am starting with them labels-on.
What works best for me is to soak the bottles in PBW or OxiClean for a couple days to get the labels falling off or at least loosened up. Then, I hand peel all the labels off and scrub the glue residue off, and hit the inside with a bottle brush. At this point, I’ used to just rinses with water and go into a Star-san solution, but I’ve found that that just doesn’t have enough oomph to kill all the wild yeasts in the air here (which latches onto the bottle labels and glue) where I live. So, rather than straight to star-san, I hit them with a 5 minute soak in a bleach solution to kill everything off then its rinsed very well before finally going into a star-san bath before bottling. Iodophor would work well too.
Thanks after reading both, I honestly believe Its a combination of both. First i didnt even think to measure priming sugar, assumed it was pre done thats my ignorange, beginner mistake there. On the bottles I did an oxy-clean bath, sanitation soak (non foam kind of san star) then bottled. Probably need to fix that up and properly do sugar next batch.
You should also evaluate your sanitation ahead of bottling. Fermenters, stoppers, racking equipment, etc.