Barrel Aging - Yeast - Bottling Question

The wife and I have been experimenting with aging beer in a 2 1/2 gallon oak barrel. We brew 5 gallon batches, bottle half of it and put the rest in the barrel to age. Our first batch was a stout and it has been bottled for a couple of months now and it is flat. I used Coopers carb tablets. Now we have a barleywine aging in the barrel and its time to bottle it. Do I need to add more yeast before bottling? If yes what would be the best type? The wife is worried about exploding our glass bottles if we add more yeast. I did not save any of the yeast from the batch. Any help would be appreciated. Cheers! John

And additional question: how do you get carbonation in your brew again?

Originally posted by Mathieu87
And additional question: how do you get carbonation in your brew again?

to the OP, id re-pitch the original strain or a highly alcohol tolerate strain, if your gravity is stable before bottling then you dont have to worry about bottle bombs


It was stable when we put it in the barrel. Any idea on how much yeast? Thanks for the info.

This is a Midnight Sun Arctic Devil clone recipe and it ended up at 12.73%.

Wyeast Scottish Ale 1728 (times 3) was used.

I’ll 2nd going with a high alcohol tolerant strain, 12.7% is pretty tough on yeast and the couple of beers I’ve done up that high had carbonation issues as well. White Labs makes a high gravity yeast that would work well. You can also use champagne yeast... but you’d have to be cautious about the difference attenuation levels of the yeast.

We have some experience in this area, as we have bottled 6 beers out of barrels (mainly barleywines over 11-12%). After having the first few fail to carbonate (we simply added dry yeast into the bottling bucket along with the priming sugar), we moved to a champagne yeast (Red Star Pasteur Champagne to be exact). Again, we just dumped into the bottle dry along with the sugar. Given the higher ABV tolerance of the champagne yeast, we couldnt figure out what happened and why the bottles didnt carbonate. I posted a thread in the homebrew forum a few months ago about this issue, and some helpful RBs suggested that if I had rehydrated the yeast before pitching, the beer would have carbonated. Well, we did just what last time we bottled our Belgian Golden that had aged in a whiskey barrel for 4 months, and it carbonated well -- actually a little too much. So, my suggestion would be to use dry champagne or high ABV tolerant yeast, rehydrate according to the methods suggested by John Palmer (How To Brew), and pitch about one-half to three quarters of the yeast slurry along with the sugar. We havent noticed any undesirable tastes in the finished beer using this yeast.

As for how to carbonate a flat beer -- I was discussing all my flat bottles with a friend, and he suggested buying a carbonator cap and a CO2 tank (I was going to buy the tank and start kegging about that time anyway) and carb one bottle at a time when we are ready to drink the bottles. So, that is how we have carbed our flat bottles. When we want to drink one, it goes into the fridge, we sanitize a one liter used water bottle (you can use larger or smaller bottles as well), and fill it with the flat beer. I place it on CO2 (normally at about 20 PSI), shake it for about 1-2 minutes, and it is carbonated and ready to drink. I sometimes let it sit on CO2 for a while as well. This way you can control the exact amount of CO2 in the finished beer. And if you are kegging or going to keg anyway, then the only thing you are buying extra is the $17 carb cap.

Hope this helps.

Originally posted by kiefdog
We have some experience in this area, as we have bottled 6 beers out of barrels (mainly barleywines over 11-12%). After having the first few fail to carbonate (we simply added dry yeast into the bottling bucket along with the priming sugar), we moved to a champagne yeast (Red Star Pasteur Champagne to be exact). Again, we just dumped into the bottle dry along with the sugar. Given the higher ABV tolerance of the champagne yeast, we couldnt figure out what happened and why the bottles didnt carbonate. I posted a thread in the homebrew forum a few months ago about this issue, and some helpful RBs suggested that if I had rehydrated the yeast before pitching, the beer would have carbonated. Well, we did just what last time we bottled our Belgian Golden that had aged in a whiskey barrel for 4 months, and it carbonated well -- actually a little too much. So, my suggestion would be to use dry champagne or high ABV tolerant yeast, rehydrate according to the methods suggested by John Palmer (How To Brew), and pitch about one-half to three quarters of the yeast slurry along with the sugar. We havent noticed any undesirable tastes in the finished beer using this yeast.

As for how to carbonate a flat beer -- I was discussing all my flat bottles with a friend, and he suggested buying a carbonator cap and a CO2 tank (I was going to buy the tank and start kegging about that time anyway) and carb one bottle at a time when we are ready to drink the bottles. So, that is how we have carbed our flat bottles. When we want to drink one, it goes into the fridge, we sanitize a one liter used water bottle (you can use larger or smaller bottles as well), and fill it with the flat beer. I place it on CO2 (normally at about 20 PSI), shake it for about 1-2 minutes, and it is carbonated and ready to drink. I sometimes let it sit on CO2 for a while as well. This way you can control the exact amount of CO2 in the finished beer. And if you are kegging or going to keg anyway, then the only thing you are buying extra is the $17 carb cap.

Hope this helps.