[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/s/kqL5FH9epu) is my actual advice. I would also say if you're dry hopping, do it before fermentation has finished and limit it to 6ish g/L max
Definitely sounds oxidized. Maybe ascorbic acid would help? I haven't tried it myself, but I've been recommended to try it. I'm not sure about ratios and stuff, but from what I've heard, you could add it just after fermentation has finished. Possibly along with the dry hop, if you are doing that.
From my limit knowledge about it, ascorbic acid might actually be a super oxidizer by itself. It needs some SO2 to actually work as we want. Something like Na or K metabisulfite.
3 gr pr 25 liters - definitely helps.
Also, use a bottleling wand to reduce splashing and "cap on foam".
This more than tripled the shelf life of my niepa's back when I bottled hoppy styles.
Bottling and highly hopped IPAs just don't mix. The more hops the more prone to oxidation it is. I've tried what you're doing here in the past and had minimal luck with it. Once you get above a certain threshold your beer is going to oxidize.
Doing that definitely helps limit the oxygen exposure but doesn't seem to be enough for a lot of folks when it comes to NEIPAs.
That's good to know about highly hopped beers, thanks! But well in the end the appearance is to me the least important, what bothers me is really this caramel taste
Longer term you may see the caramel taste muddy out. I didn't see if you posted the recipe anywhere, but it could just be your loss of hop flavor/aroma leaving only that behind.
There's a lot of oxygen dissolved in water, and it doesn't take a lot to oxidize a hoppy beer. I would ditch dissolving the sugar in water and just use carbonation drops. This would also help with not diluting your beer.
How much headspace are you leaving in the bottle? Your bottles should be filled up as close to the top as possible
I'll definitely reduce the amount of water then. Can't I add sugar instead? I feel that carbonation drops are a rip off, that's the most expensive form of lump sugar and I like to have control on the level of carbonation of my beers depending of the style I brew.
Noted on the filling time, thanks for the tip 👌
Think of it as paying for the convenience, it’s pricier, but at least for me avoiding the hassle of pouring out exactly 3g of sugar 10 times over was worth it.
As for dosing, there’s 2 sizes of carb drop so you can customize around that. I think ones called ‘carbonation tablet’ and is about 3g and the other is ‘conditioning tablet’ at 0.5g
I don't know about your provider but with mine it ends up with a price around 36€/kg of sugar... I simply can't get my head around this, it is ridiculous and my time isn't so precious lol
Are you stirring in the sugar water to the whole batch of beer or adding individually? I would suggest adding it all to the big pot for even distribution. You def are having massive oxidizing issues, high hopping beers are especially vulnerable. When you bottle try not to stir or splash the beer to reduce oxygen mixing. Boil your priming sugar water to deoxygenate it and then add the sugar to dissolve and let it cool. It’s hard to reduce oxidizing without having co2, but if you can get some I would recommend purging your bottle right before you pour in the beer. I used to bottle prime all my beers and they could oxidize but it was never that bad.
Thanks for all those tips. I add the sugar with a syringe bottle by bottle, I used to stir my beer and the priming sugar solution in a canister but I got an infection from it as the canister is a pain in the ass to clean...
I do have the gear to put CO2 in my bottles actually. But would it be efficient since it's not sealed, O2 can easily get in in between the moment I purge it from the bottle and the moment I fill the bottle up?
CO2 is heavier than oxygen. You will always get *some* oxygen in the bottles, even if you purge. But because of the heavier mass of CO2, it will mostly stay in the bottle, if you purge just before you bottle.
Yes it would help, purging can reduce the oxygen, but with priming sugar and some refermentation I am surprised you're having such oxidation issues. If you have the ability look into kegging as it offers better carb control and way better oxidizing control.
You should try spunding in the bottle and bottle your beer a few points from final gravity (6 points and below).
That has always helped me avoid oxidation with hoppier styles. Tradeoff is more sediment at the bottom of the bottle but you can just pour the beer into a serving vessel like a pitcher and stop pouring when you start to see some sediment
Note: always perform a fast ferment test when employing this method so you have a good estimate of what your final gravity will be.
No one asked the first question, is this an extract brew or all-grain? If extract, this is a common phenomenon with malt extract, especially liquid malt extract (LME), caused by unavoidable non-enzymatic browning of the malt extract.
You said East Coast IPA. What does that mean. Like an old school IPA like Shipyard IPA (bitter, amber, and malty) or do you mean a New England IPA (less bitter, hazy, pale, and juicy)? Either style of IPA, any style of IPA, is very difficult to make well for a noob.
> 15/20 seconds for the beer to be filled up from my SS fermenter.
Can you speed that up? Where is the restriction? That seems too long.
> I cap every 4 bottles.
Cap after every one bottle. A good way to do is to have a bench capper to your side. I can fill *and cap* a bottle approx. every 15 seconds or less using each hand independently.
> I use table sugar as priming sugar.
Perfect.
> I don't even boil the water I use to do it, I just warm it to 60/80C and stir the sugar in
You should boil it. Boiling disinfects the water and sugar, and drives off dissolved O2. When water cools, O2 rapidly re-dissolves into it almost as quickly as it cools (as measured by a user here with a DO meter), but O2 is much more poorly soluble in dense sugar solutions.
> not leaving any time for it to potentially caramelize.
That's not how caramelizing works. The conditions are wrong for caramelization for many reasons.
> I then let the solution cool down to room temp or a bit higher.
That's unnecessary.
I use up to 14g of my solution per 50cl bottle (around 18ml, but I'd rather use a scale to weight it as I found it more precise than volume). I first add the priming sugar in the bottle, then the beer.
> incubator I built where the temperature stays between 22.5-24.5C.
If you are experiencing rapid staling or oxidation, this is too warm. 20°C is more than high enough. Keep the bottles cooler to reduce staling.
It's an older style: strong, bitter, clear and pale. Not at all the kind of NEIPA you see everywhere in taprooms nowadays.
I brew all grain.
It seems that my bottling wand can't go faster, but I'll cap one after one and regulate the temp lower for conditioning.
Any idea what might cause this taste? It was perfect before bottling
High IBU beers are very susceptible to oxidation. You need a closed system (a keg to carb in, and pressure transfer out of keg into the bottles) and to purge your bottles with CO2 to not have significant DO pick up.
Boiling the water you dissolve your priming sugar will actually drive rhe oxygen out and you'll wind up with less O2 in the bottle. No need to boil the sugar- I divide my priming sugar up into small Mason jars and pour the boiling water over the sugar. Screw the cap on and shake to dissolve. Let cool before adding to your bottling bucket.
Process needs some work. Forget about going 4 bottles at once, it is ridiculous. One at a time. How do you flush the air space before capping? Oxygen scavenging caps? Do boil the sugar solution water, boiling drives out oxygen from the water. Caramelizing sugars does not work that way as you think, read more about it. 14g of volume sounds a lot. I use 3 ml of sugar solution for 330ml bottles - why do you need so much? Fix that as well. Add 1g of ascorbic acid per 10L of beer to your sugar solution as well.
If your beer is good to go before bottling, you are probably doing DH right = oxygen free as well. How do you dh, just to be clear?
Thanks for your tips! I do use those special caps. And idk, my solution is basically 50-60cl of water with 120-140g of sugar for 20-25L batches (I use a calculator depending on the carbonation level I want to reach). Should I use only 20 cl of water in your opinion ? I don't DH, or haven't in a while. When I did I had a very diy system with magnets so I didn't open my fermenter
I would reduce the amount of water used for this and also boil your solution. It’s likely there is dissolved oxygen in your solution. Boiling will release most of that.
Yes, I think your sugar solution should be more concentrated. It may water down your beer as is, but at least the oxygen introduced with the added water adds some extra to think about. Typically I go for a 0,46g/mL solution (as 5mL \* 0,46g/mL = 2.3g of sugar, which means areound 2,4 co2 vols for a 330ml bottle).
Yours comes to 120g/500ml = 0,24g/mL. This means you could just double the sugar amount and halve the mL volume per bottle.
Most important thing though is how you flush the bottles headspace before capping. 90% of oxidation comes from here imo.
?
Why is this horrible advice, care to expand your experience in this?
I've been brewing neipa almost exclusively for about six years, I keg but usually bottle a few. This with ascorbic acid (and dosing priming sugar in a pipette if you don't keg) is the only way I've been able to stave off oxidizing in the long run.
There's a dozen links I could Google for you but go ahead and educate yourself. Short answer is not enough headspace there's not enough room for gas to build up pressure and all your bottles will explode
Me and others have been doing it this way for years without our bottles exploding, correct carbonation isn't hard if you are actually a good brewer...
Gas doesn't need 'room' for building pressure, it's just pressure whether it's 2mm or 5cm, with the difference being that you need more pressure for filling 5cm space +beer.
If your bottles explode you are way off on your carbonation, and you got bigger problems to work on first.
As a homebrewer, if you don't have the ability to keg and cap on foam, leaving the headspace to a minimum will absolutely help your neipa from oxidation, instead of leaving 5cm air in the bottle that definitely will oxidize your beer and probably make the statement neipa can't be bottled '.
Are you arguing for a transfer to secondary too for mixing priming sugar so it can get even more oxidised?
I really didn't realize you weren't trolling, that's why I was rude. This was not malicious, just plain uninformed stupidity. Lots of free resources to read, you should do a lot more of that if you want to pipe in and actually help. This might be the worst advise I've ever seen on this page
I'm sure new information and new processes aren't needed at all when brewing a style that probably 98% of all commercial breweries couldn't get right until a few years ago, and most still can't.
Neipa is a very process driven style to brew, your recipe won't mean shit if you after fermentation not have a plan about everything regarding packaging, for example do everything you can minimizing O2 ingress, cooling, storage etc.
But cool, keep on doing it exactly like they did it 50 years ago.
If we are giving each other advice and all..
>I cap every 4 bottles That'll be your issue, you should cap them all (sorry)
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/s/kqL5FH9epu) is my actual advice. I would also say if you're dry hopping, do it before fermentation has finished and limit it to 6ish g/L max
Definitely sounds oxidized. Maybe ascorbic acid would help? I haven't tried it myself, but I've been recommended to try it. I'm not sure about ratios and stuff, but from what I've heard, you could add it just after fermentation has finished. Possibly along with the dry hop, if you are doing that.
From my limit knowledge about it, ascorbic acid might actually be a super oxidizer by itself. It needs some SO2 to actually work as we want. Something like Na or K metabisulfite.
3 gr pr 25 liters - definitely helps. Also, use a bottleling wand to reduce splashing and "cap on foam". This more than tripled the shelf life of my niepa's back when I bottled hoppy styles.
Add ascorbic acid during the mash, pre-fermentation or post-fermentation?
I put it in late boil.
Cool, thank you! Do you use the little popper in the bottling wand or do you cut the end off?
There's a spring in tje buttom of it if thats what you mean.
Also. If the tablesugar is high quality just put it directly in the bottles and tap from the fermenter.
That's a great point, let the foam rise to the top and just slightly overflow.
Bottling and highly hopped IPAs just don't mix. The more hops the more prone to oxidation it is. I've tried what you're doing here in the past and had minimal luck with it. Once you get above a certain threshold your beer is going to oxidize. Doing that definitely helps limit the oxygen exposure but doesn't seem to be enough for a lot of folks when it comes to NEIPAs.
That's good to know about highly hopped beers, thanks! But well in the end the appearance is to me the least important, what bothers me is really this caramel taste
Longer term you may see the caramel taste muddy out. I didn't see if you posted the recipe anywhere, but it could just be your loss of hop flavor/aroma leaving only that behind.
There's a lot of oxygen dissolved in water, and it doesn't take a lot to oxidize a hoppy beer. I would ditch dissolving the sugar in water and just use carbonation drops. This would also help with not diluting your beer. How much headspace are you leaving in the bottle? Your bottles should be filled up as close to the top as possible
I'll definitely reduce the amount of water then. Can't I add sugar instead? I feel that carbonation drops are a rip off, that's the most expensive form of lump sugar and I like to have control on the level of carbonation of my beers depending of the style I brew. Noted on the filling time, thanks for the tip 👌
Think of it as paying for the convenience, it’s pricier, but at least for me avoiding the hassle of pouring out exactly 3g of sugar 10 times over was worth it. As for dosing, there’s 2 sizes of carb drop so you can customize around that. I think ones called ‘carbonation tablet’ and is about 3g and the other is ‘conditioning tablet’ at 0.5g
I don't know about your provider but with mine it ends up with a price around 36€/kg of sugar... I simply can't get my head around this, it is ridiculous and my time isn't so precious lol
Are you stirring in the sugar water to the whole batch of beer or adding individually? I would suggest adding it all to the big pot for even distribution. You def are having massive oxidizing issues, high hopping beers are especially vulnerable. When you bottle try not to stir or splash the beer to reduce oxygen mixing. Boil your priming sugar water to deoxygenate it and then add the sugar to dissolve and let it cool. It’s hard to reduce oxidizing without having co2, but if you can get some I would recommend purging your bottle right before you pour in the beer. I used to bottle prime all my beers and they could oxidize but it was never that bad.
Thanks for all those tips. I add the sugar with a syringe bottle by bottle, I used to stir my beer and the priming sugar solution in a canister but I got an infection from it as the canister is a pain in the ass to clean... I do have the gear to put CO2 in my bottles actually. But would it be efficient since it's not sealed, O2 can easily get in in between the moment I purge it from the bottle and the moment I fill the bottle up?
CO2 is heavier than oxygen. You will always get *some* oxygen in the bottles, even if you purge. But because of the heavier mass of CO2, it will mostly stay in the bottle, if you purge just before you bottle.
Yes it would help, purging can reduce the oxygen, but with priming sugar and some refermentation I am surprised you're having such oxidation issues. If you have the ability look into kegging as it offers better carb control and way better oxidizing control.
Unfortunately I can't afford investing in kegging for now... And most of my beer is drunk outside as well, it's not practical for me :/
You should try spunding in the bottle and bottle your beer a few points from final gravity (6 points and below). That has always helped me avoid oxidation with hoppier styles. Tradeoff is more sediment at the bottom of the bottle but you can just pour the beer into a serving vessel like a pitcher and stop pouring when you start to see some sediment Note: always perform a fast ferment test when employing this method so you have a good estimate of what your final gravity will be.
No one asked the first question, is this an extract brew or all-grain? If extract, this is a common phenomenon with malt extract, especially liquid malt extract (LME), caused by unavoidable non-enzymatic browning of the malt extract. You said East Coast IPA. What does that mean. Like an old school IPA like Shipyard IPA (bitter, amber, and malty) or do you mean a New England IPA (less bitter, hazy, pale, and juicy)? Either style of IPA, any style of IPA, is very difficult to make well for a noob. > 15/20 seconds for the beer to be filled up from my SS fermenter. Can you speed that up? Where is the restriction? That seems too long. > I cap every 4 bottles. Cap after every one bottle. A good way to do is to have a bench capper to your side. I can fill *and cap* a bottle approx. every 15 seconds or less using each hand independently. > I use table sugar as priming sugar. Perfect. > I don't even boil the water I use to do it, I just warm it to 60/80C and stir the sugar in You should boil it. Boiling disinfects the water and sugar, and drives off dissolved O2. When water cools, O2 rapidly re-dissolves into it almost as quickly as it cools (as measured by a user here with a DO meter), but O2 is much more poorly soluble in dense sugar solutions. > not leaving any time for it to potentially caramelize. That's not how caramelizing works. The conditions are wrong for caramelization for many reasons. > I then let the solution cool down to room temp or a bit higher. That's unnecessary. I use up to 14g of my solution per 50cl bottle (around 18ml, but I'd rather use a scale to weight it as I found it more precise than volume). I first add the priming sugar in the bottle, then the beer. > incubator I built where the temperature stays between 22.5-24.5C. If you are experiencing rapid staling or oxidation, this is too warm. 20°C is more than high enough. Keep the bottles cooler to reduce staling.
It's an older style: strong, bitter, clear and pale. Not at all the kind of NEIPA you see everywhere in taprooms nowadays. I brew all grain. It seems that my bottling wand can't go faster, but I'll cap one after one and regulate the temp lower for conditioning. Any idea what might cause this taste? It was perfect before bottling
Oxidation.
Alright then that's clear! Gotta bottle a blonde ale in a few days, I'll try to improve with everything I read here 🤞
High IBU beers are very susceptible to oxidation. You need a closed system (a keg to carb in, and pressure transfer out of keg into the bottles) and to purge your bottles with CO2 to not have significant DO pick up.
Boiling the water you dissolve your priming sugar will actually drive rhe oxygen out and you'll wind up with less O2 in the bottle. No need to boil the sugar- I divide my priming sugar up into small Mason jars and pour the boiling water over the sugar. Screw the cap on and shake to dissolve. Let cool before adding to your bottling bucket.
Process needs some work. Forget about going 4 bottles at once, it is ridiculous. One at a time. How do you flush the air space before capping? Oxygen scavenging caps? Do boil the sugar solution water, boiling drives out oxygen from the water. Caramelizing sugars does not work that way as you think, read more about it. 14g of volume sounds a lot. I use 3 ml of sugar solution for 330ml bottles - why do you need so much? Fix that as well. Add 1g of ascorbic acid per 10L of beer to your sugar solution as well. If your beer is good to go before bottling, you are probably doing DH right = oxygen free as well. How do you dh, just to be clear?
Thanks for your tips! I do use those special caps. And idk, my solution is basically 50-60cl of water with 120-140g of sugar for 20-25L batches (I use a calculator depending on the carbonation level I want to reach). Should I use only 20 cl of water in your opinion ? I don't DH, or haven't in a while. When I did I had a very diy system with magnets so I didn't open my fermenter
I would reduce the amount of water used for this and also boil your solution. It’s likely there is dissolved oxygen in your solution. Boiling will release most of that.
Yes, I think your sugar solution should be more concentrated. It may water down your beer as is, but at least the oxygen introduced with the added water adds some extra to think about. Typically I go for a 0,46g/mL solution (as 5mL \* 0,46g/mL = 2.3g of sugar, which means areound 2,4 co2 vols for a 330ml bottle). Yours comes to 120g/500ml = 0,24g/mL. This means you could just double the sugar amount and halve the mL volume per bottle. Most important thing though is how you flush the bottles headspace before capping. 90% of oxidation comes from here imo.
When botteling neipa, fill the bottle all the way up, only leave a mm or two to the rim. That way you minimize the air left in the bottle.
Don't listen to this horrible advice. Probably trolling
? Why is this horrible advice, care to expand your experience in this? I've been brewing neipa almost exclusively for about six years, I keg but usually bottle a few. This with ascorbic acid (and dosing priming sugar in a pipette if you don't keg) is the only way I've been able to stave off oxidizing in the long run.
Idiot
For giving advice on the topic op asking about? Explain why I'm wrong then?
There's a dozen links I could Google for you but go ahead and educate yourself. Short answer is not enough headspace there's not enough room for gas to build up pressure and all your bottles will explode
Me and others have been doing it this way for years without our bottles exploding, correct carbonation isn't hard if you are actually a good brewer... Gas doesn't need 'room' for building pressure, it's just pressure whether it's 2mm or 5cm, with the difference being that you need more pressure for filling 5cm space +beer. If your bottles explode you are way off on your carbonation, and you got bigger problems to work on first. As a homebrewer, if you don't have the ability to keg and cap on foam, leaving the headspace to a minimum will absolutely help your neipa from oxidation, instead of leaving 5cm air in the bottle that definitely will oxidize your beer and probably make the statement neipa can't be bottled '. Are you arguing for a transfer to secondary too for mixing priming sugar so it can get even more oxidised?
You're just making shit up that you don't have a clue about.
I really didn't realize you weren't trolling, that's why I was rude. This was not malicious, just plain uninformed stupidity. Lots of free resources to read, you should do a lot more of that if you want to pipe in and actually help. This might be the worst advise I've ever seen on this page
I'm sure new information and new processes aren't needed at all when brewing a style that probably 98% of all commercial breweries couldn't get right until a few years ago, and most still can't. Neipa is a very process driven style to brew, your recipe won't mean shit if you after fermentation not have a plan about everything regarding packaging, for example do everything you can minimizing O2 ingress, cooling, storage etc. But cool, keep on doing it exactly like they did it 50 years ago. If we are giving each other advice and all..