To Much Carbonation Sometimes

[mactommy]

I have been seeing some of my beers that I bottle to have to much carbonation when I go to open them. The strange thing is that I will have 40 beers from the brew that are just fine and then in the last 8 will get way to much carbonation with bottles blowing foam all over the place when I open them. The next bottle will only be only be a little over foaming. Each is different. What is going on. I have been watching how much sugar I use for the bottling from the program. I have two different beers that are like that now.  Now I have other beers that have never shown this problem. Could it be the recipe maybe.  The bottles are just sitting on the shelve before I put them in the refrigerator so they are sitting on the shelve for 2 to 3 months. Is that bad? Is this a bottle cleaning problem? The beer I am talking about was very low carbonation when I first tasted it after bottling and my wife said it was not carbonated enough but the taste was fine to me. The carbonation does increase over time but not too much. This is a White House Honey Ale with the problem. Any ideas what I can do?

[Oginme]

You don't give a description of your priming and bottling process, so it is hard to comment on what you might be doing that you can improve on.

What I have found is that bulk priming based upon the net volume which can be transferred from the fermenter works really well.  I measure my sugar by weight and dissolve it in 2x the weight of water.  I then bring it to a boil for 10 minutes.  I transfer into a sanitized pint canning jar and seal to cool.  When I start to rack off my beer to my bottling bucket, I add the sugar solution at the start of the siphon flow so that the sugar gets mixed in well with the beer being transferred and minimizes the chance of stratification of the denser sugar solution to the bottom of the bucket.

In terms of bottle storage, most of my bottles sit in my basement at temperatures that are around 40F during the winter months and up to the low 60's in the dead of summer.  I make sure that they make it into the refrigerator for a good 3 to 4 days before I want to drink them.  This allows time for the CO2 head pressure to get absorbed into the beer and stabilize.

[KellerBrauer]

Greetings mactommy - it sounds to me like you may also be dealing with a cleanliness issue.  If you have never experienced this issue in the past, now suddenly the issue has come up, perhaps you are becoming complacent in your sanitizing practice.

My priming practices is very similar to what Oginme has outlined.  However, I add my priming sugar a little differently.  With priming sugar in mind, yeast will gobble up sugar as long as there is sugar available to consume.  So making sure the bottles are completely sanitized before filling will ensure there is no additional sugar available for the yeast to consume once it has fully consumed the priming sugar.  Again, blending the priming sugar very well with the beer and bottling in very sanitized bottles with help narrow down your foaming issue.

I hope this helps!!