overly sweet beer after adding priming sugar to keg

[VJmotion]

Hello fellow brewers!

I'm not sure what I've changed in my brewing habits (probably patience)... but for my recent brews I do the following:

rack from primary to secondary after about 1 week.
I leave the contents of the cake at the bottom in the primary fermentor.
I let the beer continue to age another week in the secondary.
I rack into my corny keg and add about 3 oz of priming sugar and put under 15 psi of pressure.
Sometimes I put the keg into the fridge, other times I don't. I wait another week or so.

What comes out is a beer that is much sweeter than when I sampled in the primary or secondary. Am I doing something wrong?

 

[JeepDiver]

If you are adding sugar you need to give it 2-3 weeks at 70+ degrees to ferment out and carb the beer. One week isn't enough, and going straight to the fridge is putting your yeast to sleep leaving all the sugar. On top of that you maybe kegging before the beer is finished if you aren't taking hydro readings.

 

[Worticia]

You do not need to prime when you are using CO2.

 

[Yooper]

While the priming sugar is unnecessary to carb if you're using co2, 3 ounces of dextrose in a 5 gallon batch would not have any flavor impact.

If it's a bit too sweet after adding three ounces of sugar, it'd be too sweet before that as well.

Uncarbonated beer has a sweeter taste than beer that's fully carbed due to the carbonic acid "bite" of carbonation. But it wouldn't taste different from what's in the fermenter I wouldn't think.

 

[VJmotion]

Some great suggestions everyone. Thank you. I've got 2 batches going right now. The overly sweet one with priming sugar which I pulled out of the fridge for a couple more weeks of aging.

The second batch I just dumped into a keg and am force carbonated with 30lbs of pressure added.

I'll report back in a couple weeks on how the priming sugar one ages.

One follow up question to JeepDiver, my SG was 1.041 and FG was 1.014. Then I dumped in the priming sugar. Looks like it was kegged at the right time, no?

 

[afr0byte]

Hopefully you're not doing the 30psi for more than a day or perhaps two.

 

[JeepDiver]

One follow up question to JeepDiver, my SG was 1.041 and FG was 1.014. Then I dumped in the priming sugar. Looks like it was kegged at the right time, no?

1.014 "should" be done, esp if you are doing extract. But no way to tell for sure unless you get the same reading a few days apart. A lot of my all grain get lower than 1.014

 

[GrowlerMonkey]

Did the conditioning help beer dry out at all? I think I have the same issue on a batch, so I'm curious if pulling it out of the keezer will help a bit.

 

[VJmotion]

I let my keg age another week or two outside of the refrigerator and it lost all of it's sweetness. But now I've moved on to force carbonation, which method I like more.