How to salvage bottled beer that failed to carbonate

I brewed my first batch of kit beer that required a kind of "secondary fermentation". That is after it was done fermenting I transferred it to another carboy and added the bourbon barrel wood chips. After 4 weeks, bottled it with recommended priming sugar. This is my first failure in brewing beer.

After over 3 weeks it has no/zero fizz. The beer is ok but without the co2 it is not good. Any ideas on:

  1. What went wrong? What killed the yeast?
  2. How to salvage it? Rebottle it? Buy a keg and co2 system and pour it in?

Thanks for any advise you can provide. Bob

Topic bottle first-time carbonation homebrew

Category Mac

1
answered at

You can also try storing the bottles upside down for a week or two. I have had great success with this in the past. I assume it has something to do with the smaller area for the yeast and sugar to settle. One side note, once carbonated you'll need to turn them back over to resettle or you'll have the yeast ring around the bottle mouth.

1
answered at

It could be that there was an insufficient amount of active yeast in the beer when you bottled it. You could try this:

  1. Uncap each bottle
  2. Add two or three grains of dry yeast
  3. Recap the bottles
  4. Keep somewhere warm for a week or two.

The other possibility is that the alcohol percentage in the beer is high enough to kill any yeast. If the beer is above 10% alcohol, you'll need to add an alcohol tolerant strain of yeast, instead of ordinary brewer's yeast.

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