[wormser]

Brewed up a Two Hearted clone the day after Christmas with the brand new burner Santa brought for me.  Was shooting for a 1.072 OG, but since it was my first time using my new burner, way underestimated the boil off volume and only ended up with a little under four gallons of 1.083.  Used a starter (1056) and got it down to 1.014 after a couple of weeks, transferred to the secondary and dry hopped for a week.  Bottled on January 19th.  Had the bottles sitting in our basement - about 50-55 degrees.  After a couple of weeks I cracked one open and there was no carbonation and tasted super sweet (priming sugar).  Realized it was probably way too cold down there, so I brought them up and put them on top of the fridge in our kitchen (65-70 degrees). Two weeks later, just cracked open one and still very little, if any carbonation.  Are these beers screwed?  Anything I can do to save them?  Should I have added more yeast when bottling?  Any help is greatly appreciated!

[gagg31]

I've had similar problems with my last couple beers.  Give all your bottles a good shake up to get the yeast back in suspension and keep them in that 65-75 degree range.  They should carbonate up in about a week or so.

I think the problem I've been having is that I've been following the bottling procedure in Palmer's How to Brew for using a bottling bucket.  He recommends you add your priming solution into a sanitized bucket and then rack your beer from the secondary on top of the solution, leaving any sediment in the secondary.  I think this minimizes the yeast in the beer that will be available to ferment the priming sugar, resulting in delays in carbonation and the need for a few shake ups to get those yeast in suspension.  In the future I am going to revert to adding my priming solution directly to the secondary, shaking it up, and and letting it sit for about 45 minutes.  This should get plenty of healthy yeast into suspension and let the dead ones settle out.  From there you can either bottle straight from the secondary or rack to the bucket and bottle from there.

Hope this helps and happy brewing.

Mike

[euge]

Try the shaking thing but inoculating with a little active wort might revive it if it doesn't work.