Re carbonation

[BrewersApprentice]

Hey all,
Is it possible to re carbonate a bottled beer that was flat when it was supposed to be ready

I used coopers carbonation drops and a few batches come out flat I now prime with white sugar can I redo the carbonation process now its been 3 months in the bottle

[Bum]

Are you asking if it is possible to add a second lot of priming sugar into one batch? Assuming your initial priming rate was adequate, I'd suggest this would be pretty dicey behaviour. Carb drops are fairly well known carbing at the top end for pretty much every style (although they are equally well known for being somewhat inconsistent, confusingly enough). If you put the right amount of carb drops in for your bottle size then re-priming is probably a fairly bad idea. There's no way entire batches are failing to prime if you've used the correct amount. I'd be looking at the temps before I started thinking about adding more priming sugar.

Having said that - there is probably no real impediment to you adding more sugar. There will still be yeast in there and that yeast will still want to eat sugar. Real danger of bottle-bombs if you do this though. If warming them up doesn't help (even gently tip them a few times to rouse the bottle) then I would definitely be learning to like flat beer.

[emnpaul]

Further to what Bum has said, which is good advice by the way, if you do have some level of carbonation in your beer adding sugar in it's crystalline form will introduce nucleation points and cause what carbon dioxide is in solution to break out into wild fizzing. To avoid this you will have to dissolve your priming sugar in a small amount of water, just enough to make a thick-ish sugar syrup and add this to your beer with a medicine glass or syringe. How much sugar to add, if any,is up to your discretion but I'd be hesitant to go more than about 60 grams for an entire batch unless they are completely devoid of carbonation. You could probably get away with a bit more if using plastics bottles.

I notice you're in South Adelaide. Generally pretty cold at this time of year, yeah? Odds on this is your problem.

[squirt in the turns]

What were they bottled in (glass or PET)? As Bum says, warm them up and see what happens before you do anything else.

Have you seen an improvement in carbonation since switching to white sugar? If so, are there any other differences between these later batches and the flat ones (e.g. where they're stored, type of bottle)?

If a few weeks at warmer temperatures doesn't do anything, then probably you either didn't get a good seal when your bottled, or the yeast is dead (very unlikely), or the carbonation drops didn't contain sugar (unheard of ). If you really want to try adding more sugar, do one or two bottles only at first, and keep them somewhere as bomb-proof as you can in case they explode. I don't know exactly how you'd go about opening a bottle that you thought might explode, but I'd suggest very carefully would be a good starting point . This assumes glass bottles. Exploding PET bottles will make a mess but are unlikely to kill you.

[jello]

Temperature seems like the obvious culprit. A little more information would be handy though. Like, are you fermenting your beer in temperature controlled environment and the style of yeast(lager or ale or rubbish)? Final gravity of your beer?

I'd try the other suggestions already made before trying to add more sugar.

Oh....and I hope your bottles a properly sanitised??