Bottle conditioning: Interpreting bubbles

[Adam]

In the long, drawn out process of moving to kegging (still haven't gotten a fridge yet) so I had to bottle up my batch of dunkelweizen.

Extract batch (Breiss LME), primed with corn sugar, bottled for 10 days at 68F, then chilled in the fridge for 4 hours before sampling.

Here's the first bottle. Looks OK.


Here's a closeup of the head.


My question is do the big bubbles mean the CO2 isn't yet dissolved into solution quite yet, or is that a product of something else?

[ajdelange]

Carbon dioxide does take time to "meld" with the beer. I don't understand the physics or chemistry but time does improve head up to a point.

I don't think that's what you are seeing here though. The kind of head you get depends on the protein spectrum in the wort and, when you use extract, that is something over which you have no control. Some extract beers are going to have practically no head retention and others have pretty good head retention. Those large bubbles are not a good sign but give it some time and see how it turns out.

[Quin]

Also bubbles sticking to side of glass indicate glass isn't "beer clean." Try dunking your glass a couple times in star san. That seems to help.

[Adam]

This is the same kit I brewed a few times before and maybe the bubble thing is new or I didn't take notice in previous batches.

The glass is a cheap plastic pilsner glass, you can see the seam in the closeup pic. I came home from work, poured and drank a PBR in the glass, then tried my homebrew.