Carbonation and CO2

[jerseyboyd]

Hello fellow home brewers,

A question about CO2 and head retention in bottled beers. Yesterday we tasted the result of our first attempt at bottling two of our beers, replicas of London Pride and London Porter.

Taste was great, plenty of CO2 (even a bit too much to my personal taste), but no head retention.

Any ideas about why this might be?

 

[Nicks90]

Give it time.
In my experience I find the longer I leave it, the smaller the bubbles get and the more head retention I get.
Starts out with bubbles like you get in lemonade and gradually gets better over the next 4 weeks until you get a creamy head.
My problem is I can never wait that long .....

 

[jerseyboyd]

OK, thanks for that. In fact, we bottled on 2 February and tasted this Saturday, 9 March. So that's 5 weeks.
We also tasted the same 2 brews directly from cask, and both had loads of natural CO2 AND creamy heads.
But I shall put a few bottles aside...