IBA - Should I bottle tomorrow?

[pvburton]

My 1.071 OG All-Grain IBA/BIPA has sat in the better bottle for 3 weeks now; last week it was at 1.024 and this week its at 1.023.

Should I bottle condition tomorrow? I used WLP005 when has an attenuation range of 67%-74%, which means i'm just above the lower-bound.

I smell sweet and some hops, and taste a hint of sweet in the malt, with a strong bitter hop backbone. Is it ready? I'm concerned if it gets drier I'll loose the perceived 'balance' this has (estimated 6.29% ABV), yet I know I'm somewhat shootin' in the wind here since I have no idea what the carbonation is going to do to me.

Will the bottle conditioning help bring out the dry hop aroma more and/or also perhaps kick-start a bit more attenuation?

 

[TTB-J]

As to your two last questions - yes, carbonation helps bring out the hop aromas, and hopefully not, you don't want more attenuation in the bottle because that's how you wind up with bottle bombs.

Take another reading tomorrow, if it says 1.023, then it's probably safe to bottle.

 

[pvburton]

So I went ahead and bottled, chose a relatively low amount of priming sugar since I wasn't quite convinced it was totally done, and it sure wasn't!

Getting foam-overs like the previous batch I know I over-carbed (my process came up 20% short of 5g). Since last time I had a clear process flaw combined with a recipe that called for a moderately high amount of carbonation + a highly attenuating yeast and this time there's visible evidence of additional fermentation at the bottom of every bottle, I'm pretty well convinced I don't have a system infection. Its not enough to break bottles, just enough to be annoying and add an extra carbonic bite to things and churn up all all the crud. I just struck out twice in a row :-|

The previous batch, once I figured this out, I took a few bottles and uncapped, let them sit, and recapped and let sit for a week and it returned to the awesomeness from the one bottle I had before the over-carbonation took full effect. It saved my perspective on that recipe and gives me some confidence I can fix this entire batch at once, if I can get some help.

So the question is... is there a process I can follow to uncap, vent, and recap my bottles without losing too much volume/cause a mess due to foam-over? I'm hoping somebody has done this successfully in the past and can share.