coopers carb drops flat beer!

[Brycey]

I tried one of my first ever brew bottles last night it was flat as a pancake no bubbles no head what so ever!

I bottled with two coopers carb drops per 500ml bottle,they have been sitting in the same room it was fermented in.The bottle i tried had been inside for one week and outside for one week i know it's supposed to be two and two but i thought it would have had some life in it after the week in week out.The rest of the bottles are due to go outside today that's been the full two weeks the thing is i don't fancy waiting two more weeks for 42 bottles of flat beer.

It was still a bit cloudy as well and still had that homebrew twang have i done something wrong or am i just being to impatient?

Could someone explain the whole two in two out process,what the warm does,what the cold does?

Forgot to mention it's a german pilsner style and the plastic bottles do seem to have firmed up a bit,i have another 44 bottles sitting with same carb drops(coopers european lager)hope i have'nt messed up two batches the swmbo will not be happy the amount of money i've spent on equipment

Any advice would be much appreciated
B

 

[SloeBrewer]

I find that two weeks at room temp is needed for proper carbonation. It helps to use at least one plastic bottle so you can give it a squeeze and see how firm it is and thus how far the carbonation has progressed. If it's too cold, the yeast will work much more slowly or even go into hibernation. Even if it only takes a week for the yeast to eat the sugar, leaving it a further week enables the yeast to clear up any by-products, which will help get rid of that twang.

Your beers then need a further two weeks to clear, somewhere cool, so the yeast can drop out of suspension, but the longer you leave it, the better it will taste and clearer it will be. As a guideline, try leaving it to condition for one week for every 10 points of original gravity, so if it started at 1.048, allow it to condition for four to five weeks.

This does mean that a typical beer is not actually ready to drink for eight weeks (two weeks primary fermentation, two weeks carbonation, four weeks conditioning), but the solution to this is to have several brews running so that you can build up a nice stash :drink:

 

[kev]

Damn.

I bottled last Sunday and only used 1 drop per 500ml.

Not looking good for me then.

K

 

[Brycey]

So as i said above the bottle that i had a try of was inside for a week then moved outside for a week and it was very flat!
So last night i moved the rest outside after the full 2 weeks but thought i ought to try another just to see if the extra week made any difference and it did still not much of a head but lots of bubbles pretty much from first to last drink so i'm relieved that the drops are working.
I also tried one of my tc's as well that have been in the bottle for 2weeks(these were batch primed)stuck it in the fridge for a couple of hours and i must say very impressed with the flavour even after 2weeks and it had plenty of fizz.So i think batch priming is the way to go in the future!that has left me with an odd number of tc bottles so i think i need to have another tonight just to even it up

Also just read on another thread that conditioning should be done cool not cold,i don't really have anywhere in the house that's cool so outside is pretty much my only option.Is this a problem? Because it' been pretty cold up here recently! :

B