Reaching high carbonation levels with force carb. method

[animaldoc]

Don't know if you'll get the "pop" but carbing really cold and moving it into cold bottles should give you a pretty lively mead ..... I'd follow the advice about the cold bottles and cold sanitizer, worked beautifully for my first time using a beergun last night.

Just remember you will have a real mess on your hands if you try to purge the headspace while the beergun is still immersed in the mead. Ask me how I know

[brewinhard]

Don't know if you'll get the "pop" but carbing really cold and moving it into cold bottles should give you a pretty lively mead ..... I'd follow the advice about the cold bottles and cold sanitizer, worked beautifully for my first time using a beergun last night.

Just remember you will have a real mess on your hands if you try to purge the headspace while the beergun is still immersed in the mead. Ask me how I know

Ha! I love learning things the hard way.

[spiderwrangler]

Thanks for the tips guys

Just the Tipâ„¢

[philbrasil]

Hey look, here´s the funny guy.....

[Ozwald]

Also be sure to package your mead in bottles that can handle 5 vol or so. Typical bottles will not withstand that high of carbonation and could burst if not kept cold. Although I have bottled 4 vol in LHBS brown bottles with no problems (maybe just lucky).

3.5 is my absolute limit. Even if the bottles can handle a little bit more, they are being mass produced & many have minor flaws. I'm not sure if something with 5 volumes would even stay liquid when opening, but if it did, it'd definitely be in a thick glass bottle. Cage/cork some 750's perhaps?

[philbrasil]

So today I tried to bottle and failed miserably. I held my cornelius at 34ºF for 3 weeks at 35 psi. Today I vented, used my beergun dispensing at a low 3-5 psi and all I got was foam. I tried to wait for it to subside, but everytime I top up there was lots more of it. NO way to bottle it. So what I did was to get the 1/3 on one bottle and topped up the other 2 bottles I was trying to fill (capped this 2 and left the rest of my mead for a later try). When I tasted my mead from this bottle what I got was barely spritzy. Not even that.

My course of action will be to vent the keg several times before bottling on flip-top bottles with that minimum carbonation. The good thing is my mead tastes awesome, and it will probably improve since it´s not crystal clear yet.

My conclusion is that it is not possible to achieve champagne levels of dissolved CO2 with force-carb + beergun. Maybe with a counter-pressure that could happen, but I don´t own one and I don´t intend to. So next time I will prime and bottle it. Then I can either research and try a champenoise methode or just have some sediment in the bottom.

I am a little frustrated, but in the back of my mind I had this coming.

[Ozwald]

Did you adjust your regulator down to 3-4 psi before hooking up the beergun? How cold were the bottles?

[adamK]

The beer gun is still going to need the tubing length to reduce foaming, correct (I don't have a beer gun so I don't really know)? If you need the 10 ft of tubing for normal carbonation levels, wouldn't you need even more tubing for twice as much co2? The lengths might be ridiculous, but I thought I remembered seeing the beer gun recommended to work when running at full pressure.

I guess lowering the pressure *should* help that problem, but my experience with my cobra tap/racking cane bottler (a somewhat similar system) has not supported that, at least not until I have filled bottles from most of the keg.

TL:DR : Another option might be increasing the length of tube running to the beer gun.