Carb drops making beer foam over?

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MikePote

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So im a moron. I grabbed a bag of maltodextrine instead of priming sugar and proceeded to prime, bottle and cap. Four or five days later I discovered a bag of maltodextrine on my counter and it hit me that I was out of priming sugar when I bottled and habitually grabbed a bag .of white powder but the wrong bag.

Ok no big deal. Ill just add carb drops to each bottle and recap. I have used carb drops in the past and I find they overcarbed the beers I put them in but it was really my only option aside from dumping everything back into a bottling bucket and rebottling. I put 12 beers on the counter, uncapped and added carb drops. FOAM like crazy. Probably 2oz from each bottle foamed out after adding. Is this normal? I stopped after the 12 beers were recapped to write this post and wanted to know if I should proceed with the carb drops. I had only used them on a 4 one gallon SMASH beer experiment but they never foamed over. Please help.

Thanks
 
This is just a hypothesis, but maltodextrine is primarily glucose, so I'm guessing your beers carbonated a bit (I won't begin to posit if it was more or less than what you want, I'm not a chemist). Then you drop in the carbonation drop, which has tons of nice nucleation sites, causing the beer to rapidly de-carbonate. Like dropping a Mentos candy into soda.
 
This is just a hypothesis, but maltodextrine is primarily glucose, so I'm guessing your beers carbonated a bit (I won't begin to posit if it was more or less than what you want, I'm not a chemist). Then you drop in the carbonation drop, which has tons of nice nucleation sites, causing the beer to rapidly de-carbonate. Like dropping a Mentos candy into soda.

Ok so that sounds like exactly what happened. I was under the impression that maltodexrine was unfermentable. Was I mistaken and it is SLIGHTLY fermentable? If that is the case then would it be advisable to add carb drops to the other 40 bottles that I did nothing to and deal with the overflow or would anybody recommend anything different?

Thanks so much for the help.
 
If the bottles are foaming over...they should be carbonated....

Sounds like fermentation was not finished and you got some extra sugars besides the maltodextrin in the bottle.
 
Ok so that sounds like exactly what happened. I was under the impression that maltodexrine was unfermentable. Was I mistaken and it is SLIGHTLY fermentable? If that is the case then would it be advisable to add carb drops to the other 40 bottles that I did nothing to and deal with the overflow or would anybody recommend anything different?

Thanks so much for the help.

I have read that Maltodextrin is slightly fermentable (~5% maximum by normal yeast).
 
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