Why is my Beer Flat?

This can be one of the worst experiences to have when you’re going to open your first homebrew or any brew for that matter. We wanted to break down why you get flat beer and some ways to fix it if it happens to you.

This can be one of the worst experiences to have when you’re going to open your first homebrew or any brew for that matter.

You get all excited to drink this amazing beer. You clean your favorite glass so it’s perfect and shiny.  Then you got to open the bottle and the one noise you expected to hear, you don’t.

Then disappointment sets in right away.

Having an uncarbonated beer is just not a good experience and it really alters the taste of beer as well.

The two most common issues resulting in flat beer are:

Not giving the beer enough time in the bottles (we suggest a minimum of 2 weeks) or not using enough pricing sugar in your beer.

Now if your beer is flat there are a few things you can do to spruce it back up.

Before doing anything, you want to be sure that your beer was sitting at the ideal temperature, 70-78 degrees, and you want to be certain that you added the right amount of priming sugar or carbonation drops.

If you are certain that your temperature is right, and you added the right amount of sugar then it is mostly like two issues.

Either the yeast for whatever reason did not eat up all the sugar you added, or your bottles are allowing some CO2 to escape.

The majority of the time it is that the yeast did not eat up all the sugar, in the bottles. What we recommend here is letting the bottles sit for another 2 weeks at room temperature and that should help fix the under carbonation.

Another yeast issue is that if you brewed with an expired can then the yeast could just be too old and there are not enough active yeasts left to eat up the priming sugar. In this case, you can sprinkle a little bit of yeast into each bottle to see if this will help. Just be sure you are only doing a little bit as you don’t want to create bottle bombs.

If you are using our Mr. Beer bottles then you can squeeze the bottles and if you hear or feel air coming out around the caps, then you have a leaking bottle. Not much you can do that this point, but you will want to replace your bottles before your next brew.

Lastly, if you did notice that you did not add enough priming sugar to your bottles, and you are 100% sure that you did not then you can open the bottles and add in some more sugar. Now, this will lose any carbonation that you already had and introduce oxygen to your beer. So we don’t recommend doing this, but if you feel you need to, you can remove the cap, add the missing sugar and then close the cap and let the bottles sit for another 2-3 weeks at room temperature.