About a year ago when we made our four ‘big’ beers, we realized that we needed to bottle them so we could drink some, age some and share some. It’s harder to do those things when the beer is in a keg in my garage. Bottling meant that we would have to bottle condition the beer which was a change from force carbonation that we do for the kegged beers. So we made a pretty standard sugar starter, perhaps going a little light with the sugar. We thought that there might be some residual sugars in the beer and also that we would probably be drinking these a little warmer than your basic pilsner or pale ale and we were trying to be sure that we wouldn’t have bottles bursting in our basements.

Adding yeast to a bunch of bombers meant re-capping.

It turned out that most of the beer was not conditioning properly. We did some testing and determined that the sugar was fine; the problem was in the yeast. We realized that the longer the beer sat in the secondary, the more of the yeast died or became inactive. The porter only sat for a week or two and it carbonated somewhat – enough so that we decided not to re-yeast those bottles. But the barleywine and stout (which used the same yeast as the porter) had been sitting longer, maybe three to four weeks, and these bottles had slight to no carbonation. We had to pop the caps and add new conditioning yeast and re-cap those. After a few weeks the results were clear – we now had carbonation.

I think we had plenty of sugar and yeast in this one.

Some of the older beers that we bottled were fine. In fact, a few were over-carbonated as you can see here. These were some of the reasons that we have been kegging exclusively for the past 15 years.

I think we have started to get a handle on the yeast problems, so things should even out in 2015. We have decided to extablish four or five yeast strains to use this year. We will need an everyday ale yeast, an ale yeast better suited to high gravity beers, a Belgian ale yeast, a Kolsch strain that we have already committed to, and perhaps a Brett. The idea will be to wash, store, and reuse these strains for a year or more. The process of creating the starters for a new beer is a bit time consuming and expensive if one needs to purchase the three stir plates needed. Chris has the stir plates, flasks, etc., but the goal is to have the rest of us help more with the yeast development and propagation.