To make a long story short, beer was filtered (so no residual yeast and this is a high gravity beer at 10%, then in bottling, added bottling sugar first and it was mixed in well. Later added fresh bottling yeast, but forgot to mix it up before bottling. Now, some bottles are carbonated fine, but other bottles are flat and sweet. The question is: is there any way to tell which bottles are carbonated and which ones are flat without opening them? :-[
Shouldn’t the carbonated bottles have a layer of yeast on the bottom? I would think that would be an easy thing to check.
I know it’s too late for this time, but if you mark the level in the bottle with a sharpie, you can actually see when it is carbonated, because the level raises up an eighth inch or so.
Ok, well, to make a short story longer, there was some yeast left, but the yeast wasn’t carbonating well. This actually happened last year, and we’ve since changed our yeast for a more robust yeast for bottling high alcohol beers. We’ve found that a random bottle will have great carbonation but the others are flat and sweet. They all tend to have yeast, but the ones with the fresh yeast (I’m guessing) seem to be the ones that are good.
Hmm, unfortunately it is too late, but that is an interesting observation.
The only thing we have noticed is that some of the less filled bottles (ie a bit more headspace) seem to have carbonated a bit more … and are less sweet. We tried shaking them a bit and looking at the foam, but there really didn’t seem to be any noticeable difference between them. May have to just chalk this up to experience.
just have a capper and a little dish of dry yeast with you every time you open a bottle to drink. no pfft on opening, add yeast and recap!