I've got a batch of beer where some bottles have much more carbonation than others and I can't figure it out.
My ale fermented fine --tastes great but is not well carbonated.
I used Northern Brewers priming sugar calculator, weighed the sugar out to the gram on a digital scale, put in the bottling bucket, stirred gently, waited 30 mins and bottled.
Two weeks later chilled a bottle, popped the top, taste good but has only a bit of head and very little carbonation.
Waited another week, popped open another, massive head and almost over carbonated (had a bit of additional foam coming out of the bottle after the initial pour with the bottle in a vertical position on the table).
Thought everything was fine.
Next bottle, FLAT. Very little carbonation.
The one one bottle with the massive head of foam and lots of carbonation was out of the bottom of the bottling bucket and had lots of sediment in it. Why should that make a difference? I'm also guessing it was probably bottled about 20 minutes later than the first beer that went into bottles ( and that's because I only sanitize clean bottles immediately before filling them instead of sanitizing a whole batch at once). I wonder if the sanitizer is killing some of the yeast although I'm getting some carbonation and I've used this same method on several previous batches without problems.
But it puzzles me why the one bottle with the sediment in it is almost over-carbonated while the other bottles I've sampled don't have nearly enough.
Thanks in advance for your comments and suggestions.