What should you do when your bottled beer doesnt carbonate?

My first rule of thumb is to WAIT. Sometimes we rush into wanting to try our beer and it hasnt had enough time to carb up. I have had beer that carbonates in a week, but that doesnt usually happen. (When it does it still tastes sort of green, requiring longer conditioning anyway.)

If you have given the beer three weeks to carb up at least and its still flat, the next factor to examine is temperature. Its OK to move the beer to a temperature that is higher than your normal fermentation temp. There is so little fermentation that goes on it generally wont hurt it much. For me, 70-72F is a good temp to carbonate at naturally (even though I like to ferment at 65-68F). Sometimes this step is as simple as bring the cases of beer up from the basement and into the corner of a spare room for a week or two.

If its still not carbonated, now what????

Well, you have to really think back now and try to remember if you added the priming sugar. If you think you forgot to add priming sugar, then find a way to remind yourself next time to be sure you add it. Maybe if you drape the bag of sugar over your capper so you cant miss it.or tape the bag of sugar to your chest.

If you think you forgot the sugar you can to add a little sugar to each bottle, but weighing out suck a small amount is tough for each bottle. Another option would be to make a concentrated solution of sugar in water and use an eye dropper to put in the required drops to be the same sugar per bottle as intended. (Of course, this all requires a little math on your part). Probably an easier solution would be to try CarbTabs. These are little sugar tablets that go in each bottle.

The last resort that I dont really recommend is pouring the flat beer into the bottling bucket again and adding sugar on the whole. Personally, I would ratherdump out the beer or drink it flat. The process of carefully collecting all the beer again will certainly oxidize the beer making it taste really bad even if it does carb up. Id rather chalk it all up to a learning experience than drink oxidized beer.

So if you beer is flat and doesnt seem to want to carb up, try my suggestions. You can always keep it and mix it with a new batch of beer that you intentionally over carb with an extra ounce of priming sugar. Then blend the two in the glass. I think that is the best way to rescue a batch if you cant bring yourself to dump out a whole batch.

Good luck. Let us know if you have more interesting methods for rescuing flat beer.