Home brewers: you ever overprime your bottles? What did you do?
2I was bottling cider while drinking heavily and I looked at the piece of paper I did my math on for priming sugar. I meant to shoot for 2.8 volumes of CO2, looks like I actually did 3.8. This was three days ago, no explosions yet. Most of em are in la chouffe bottles (pretty stout and thick bottles), but a few are in harp bottles (not the lightest in the world, but certainly thinner than the la chouffe).
For now I have em in a cardboard box with the top duct taped shut in a room where it’s not the end of the world if some liquid gets on the floor.
Is there something else I should do? Should I try to vent them? Am I worrying over nothing? Is my neighborhood about to be covered in glass shrapnel?
/image la chouffe bottles
/image harp premium irish lager bottles
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Not speaking from vast experience, but the few bottles I’ve had over-pressurize ended up blowing the cap.
The beverage distribution was impressive, but no broken glass. The caps were crimped with a hand-lever device, so that may have caused under-crimping to go with the over-pressurization, though.
YMMV?
@meverett mines one of those red two-handled crimpers as well, so nothing professional grade. Caps blowing is fine, maybe i’ll just leave em and see what happens.
@meverett I also just put a bunch of those in harp bottles in the fridge to be safe.
still flat. I think we’re good. The 17.8% abv is probably slowing the yeast down significantly.
@Seeds lived in a coop once and a PhD student in chemistry (yes irony here) and an undergrad in engineering decided to make beer. After bottling a bunch (like 6 or 7) blew, glass (and beer) all over and the undergrad got a piece of glass in his lip as he had all the bottles in his room.
Yikes, 17.8% abv? What strain of yeast did you use?
. The other made the head so frothy that we had to pour it into pitchers and let it sit for several minutes before pouring it into bottles.
The only two cases of serious over-carbonation I’ve seen were both with wheat beers. (Different reason than yours; when wheat yeasts run out of sugar, they apparently release enzymes that allow them to metabolize starch. Clever, naughty yeast.) Made all sorts of fun, but neither case caused glass breakage. One caused violent ejection of the caps that dented the ceiling of the bathroom they were in - luckily not in my house
@mehcuda67 sounds like it worked out well enough for me
I’m still using my first batch of yeast- red star premier cuvee, supposedly the same as ec-1118. I’ve heard different numbers on its max, but I let it sit for over a month this time and my hyrdometer math (not sober, but checked a few times) got 17.8. Tasted dry to me when I bottled it.
week in update:
no explosions, tastes delicious, pretty highly carbonated. More so than most beers I drink for sure, less so than soda. I’m tempted to put it all in the fridge now, but I’m curious what a few more days will do.