How to use a Soda Stream to carbonate flat beer

Can you use a Soda Stream to carbonate beer?

The short answer is yes. 

The slightly longer answer is yes but it's gonna get messy if you force carbonate homebrew beer without following the advice below. 

Here's how to safely and cleanly use a Soda Stream machine to carbonate flat beer

Soda Stream machines are a classic piece of kitchen equipment. If there was one thing I was envious of my mate Molyneux as a kid, it was his soda machine. After school, we'd head to his house, eat mountains of hot toast and butter and wash it down with homemade red fizzy. 

Or lemoade.

It was the best. 

But now I'm an adult and I've cracked open a home brew expecting to hear that wonderous sounding FITZZZ of CO2 escaping from my beer ... and nothing. 

The sound of silence. 

And defeat. 

Or am I defeated? 

A trick to fix/fizz a flat beer is to add a fresh beer to it! It's a handy rescue to be able to open a can of beer and pour into the flat beer. 

But what if I don't have a spare beer?

The soda stream machine is starting to look pretty good eh? 

So? Shall I pour my flat beer into a Soda Stream bottle, synch it with the machine and press the bubble maker? 

Only if you are a very brave brewer. 

One simply doesn't stuff the gas into the bottle at an explosive rate. Soda is generally carbonated to at least twice the pressure of beer so do this can be a risky little game.

Otherwise, this will happen:

With that in mind, you may want to do your initial testing outside. Ideally, before you begin these steps your flat beer will be as chilled as possible. 

1. Transfer the flat beer into a genuine Soda Steam bottle. You do not have to have it filled to the line on the bottle - a single bottle of beer will mix with the CO2...

2. Connect the bottle properly. This is a must. If you do not, the beer proteins will connect with the CO2 in ways that will cause a beer explosion. 

3. Give the machine ONE frim press of gas and then release your finger. Do not do an extended press of the button. Such a move will greatly increase your chances of beer spillage.

4. Let the newly carbonated beer 'settle' in the machine before you release the bottle from the Soda Stream. Trust me, let it sit a bit. Your bottle may be quite foamy and fizzy. Let it settle.

5. Remove from the device and pour your beer into a cold glass. 

This is the time to assess what you have done. 

Did it work? Did you put enough gas in?

Did you put too much? (You'll have learned quite quickly if you did!)

This is where some muscle memory comes in so that you learn just how much to press the Soda Stream button. Too little, you're beer will still be flat. Too much and it will be all over the floor. 

Pro tip: The more you burp CO2 in your beer, the greater the chance of an explosion of foam all over the ceiling and the odd chance an over-pressurized bottle goes flying off the Soda Stream! Also, the fresher or more filled the CO2 Cannister is, the greater the rate of release of CO2 into the beer. So hold back on massive depresses of the button if you have a fresh gas bottle!

Here's a handy video lesson that guides you step by step:

 

REMEMBER TO CLEAN YOUR SODA MACHINE

Rinse off the valve of the Soda Stream with water. Beer residue can get quite icky and reduce the efficiency of the valve and impact normal making soda practices. 

What about conditioning beer with Soda Stream?

All of the above advice has been to rescue a flat beer, not as part of the consideration of carbonating a whole fermenting drum with a view to capping the newly gassed beer for conditioning. 

I honestly have no idea if this would work. So, some 'google fu' tells me you can do this. This perhaps seems counterintuitive but there we go. I venture however using a Soda Stream for full carbonation is a costly way to carbonate beer. You are probably better off priming your fermenter drum with sugar and bottling. The choice, as always Dear Brewer, is yours. 

Fair Warning: The Soda Stream instruction manual CLEARLY states to not use their device for anything other than making soda water. 

You have been warned.  

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Venting over carbonated beer bottles

Have you ever had a beer gusher? 

They damn well suck.

You casually open your beer and whoosh! There's beer foam all over the bloody place. 

Why did this happen? 

The fizz is the result of over carbonation. 

There could be a few reasons for this. 

1. You bottled too soon and fermentation continued.

2. Your beer is infected by bacteria and they have overproduced on the CO2

3. You added too much sugar at bottling time.
4. You served your beer too warm

All these factors you have a strong degree of control over. 

If you've bottled too soon, you should have taken a final gravity reading and determined that matched the kind of beer your making and that you had the same reading two days in a row. 

If your beer is infected, it's quite likely you didn't clean and sterilize your equipment and bottles properly. I've said this a million times on these pages, you got do the basics and do them well. 

And if you added too much sugar, you might want to rethink your practices. If you batch primed, how much sugar did you add?

From my experience 40 - 60 grams is enough sugar to prime 23 litres of beer.

 Any more and you will quite likely get gushers. 

If you added sugar individually to each bottle, then you clearly added too much sugar. I used to use a good amount of sugar, now I try and use half a tea spoon of sugar. It's more than enough. 

If you want a consistent and safe measure, you can always consider using carbonation drops when bottling your brew. 

How to fix gusher beers by venting the bottle

To fix over carbonation, vent your beers individually. 

The technique is that you gently pry the bottle cap open so that only a part of the cap is exposed, let the CO2 escape and then quickly recap.

You need to all of this before the gusher occurs! If you are clever you should be able to use your bottle opener to both open and close the cap with the same action. 

It will be a long, painful process and you'll likely need to repeat the venting on each bottle if there is a lot of built up pressure. 

I have found in the past that the colder the beer is, the less likely it is to gush or be too fizzy or foamy.

Thus I would recommend that you leave your beers in a fridge for 24 hours before attempting this little rescue job of your beer.

Let's be clear though - if you've got gushers because you've got a bacteria problem, your beer is rooted and you'll need to tip it out and sterilize the bottles very well. Or you can store for a long time and hope the beer sorts itself out. That's kind of a Hail Mary move though...

A wee risk to bear in mind 

Over-pressurized beer can explode.

And that means glass can explode. I've seen the result in my man shed - green glass everywhere and the dank smell of wasted beer. 

If your under pressure beers are at that much of an extreme point you should ask yourself is it safe to vent?

While beer bottles are generally tough, the risk is there so I'd recommend you use gloves and a good pair of safety googles or glasses. 

What's the lesson here then? 

Use less sugar when bottling beer

Extra for Experts: Carbonating homebrew using a Soda Stream machine

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How to fix 'flat' homebrew beer

Ah, there can be no greater disappointment as a home brewer to flick a beer opener onto the top of a bottle to crack the brew and you hear the sound of... silence.

You have a flat beer. 

It’s actually an experience sadder than most Simon and Garfunkle songs.

Flat beer means something has gone wrong in the brewing or bottling process and you will need to trouble shoot it to figure out what went wrong - there is a fix or two!

 

What is this flat beer and how can I fix it?

It means your beer has not carbonated in the bottle and hence your brew has no fizz, sparkle or pop.

So, the first thing one can do is check if this was a single instance of a dud by opening a second bottle.

If you hear that fizz of C02 escaping, you know that first bottle was just a dud. 

This was probably due to user error when bottling the beer. 

Did you properly cap it it? Y

ou’ve got to make sure your capper really makes a firm seal. Other wise your beer will carbonate but the CO2 can escape and no pressure builds.

Sometimes this has happened to me, mistakes will happen to the best of us right?

So the fix in this example is to mix the flat beer with a properly carbonated beer - this way, I don’t have to dump the flat beer and I get to drink two beers.

Two beers!  

I call that #winning.

But, if you opened two beers and they bptj were flat, then you’ve got a problem and you're back to:

...hello darkness, my old friend.

What's the play to fix this?

Consider first:

Did your beer ferment in the first instance?

• Were there bubbles coming out of the airlock for two to four days at least?
• Was there some thick gunky residue at the water level where the wort sat inside the drum - this is a strong sign fermentation has occurred properly
• Did you take readings of your beer using a hydrometer - did you see a change in readings and obtain a final gravity?

If you did observe any of that, you probably achieved primary fermentation. This is good as it means your flat beer will have alcohol in it.

So what might be happening here is that secondary fermentation has not occurred.

Beers need to condition properly at the right temperature for secondary fermentation to start.

If a bottled beer is too cold, then the yeast will go to sleep and not eat the sugars in the beer - and thus you’ve got no bubbles.

So, if you are certain primary fermentation has occurred and that you properly capped your beers, then ask yourself, was your beer stored in a suitably warm place?

This has totally happened to me once before - I left a crate of beers to condition in my outside shed in the middle of winter - and sure enough, it was too cold for the yeast. The solution was to bring the beers inside and leave for another week. Sure enough, the yeast warmed up, started fermentation and my flat beer became bubbly beer in a week.

It’s clear then that when you bottle, your beer needs to be warm - so the yeast can activate and commence secondary fermentation. 

It’s OK to place it in a cooler place later (but don’t make it an extremely cold environment!) - so to give your beer its best chance of fermenting - let your bottles condition for three or 4 days in a warm place.

They can then be conditioned for another few weeks elsewhere.

But what if primary fermentation did not occur? Why could this be?

You know the cliche of when your computer goes bung and won’t turn on and you call the helpline and they say, is it plugged in Sir? 

And you feel like a real jackass because your laptop was not plugged in?

Not pitching your yeast into the wort is the equivalent.

So ask yourself, did you add your yeast to the fermenter?

So you did them. Fine. Let's move on.   

A secondary question, did you pitch the yeast at the right time?

If you add the yeast when the brew is freshly boiled, the hot wort will kill the yeast and you will not have fermentation occur.

If you have realized you’ve done this before bottling, you can add some new yeast to your now properly cooled wort and see if it will rejuvenate it - there should still be plenty of sugars for the yeast to eat

It just means you’ve delayed your brewing schedule!

If you’ve already bottled, you may want to dump your beer or open them all up, dump them in a fermenter, pitch a new yeast and try your luck. If you go this route, try and introduce as little oxygen into your new mix as possible as beer hates oxygen past primary fermentation.

Not enough sugar?

Sugar content is intrinsic to the success of your beer

Another reason why your beer may be flat is that you under primmed the sugar.

If you put too little sugar in your bottled beer, then not enough bubbles will be produced as there’s not enough food for your yeast.

Batch priming your wort with sugar is an easy way to get sugar into your beer (as opposed to individually adding it to each bottle) and it saves time - but make sure you add enough sugar!

If you are trying to make a low calorie beer, then you need to reduce sugars at the primary fermentation stage, not during bottling.

Corn sugar, cane sugar, and dried malt extract (DME) work best for priming beer.

If you used old yeast or primary fermentation did not occur, a bit of a hack to fix is to open up each bottle by hand and add a few grains of yeast to each one. 

Do not add too much as the yeast may over fermenting, leading to gushers. Accordingly, your results may vary with this trick!

Finally, what was the headspace level in the bottle neck?

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11 tips and tricks for when using carbonation drops:

11 handy tips and tricks for when using carbonation drops on bottling day

1. 60 carbonation drops, will be enough drops for one 23 litre brew.
2. 1 dop for a 300 - 500 ml bottle, two for anything over 750 mls.
3. Once you have added the drops and bottled the beer, it will take about 7 days to condition. This is the bare minimum before which you can drink your beer. The patient beer brewer should wait about 3 weeks before sampling their brew but we know you won't listen...
4. Beware over priming your beer. If you add too much sugar or dextrose, too much CO2 will be produced by the yeast and it will have nowhere to escape. It will escape in the form of a 'beer bomb' when you open your beer and it will gush out the next of the bottle like a geyser and go all over the place and you will have committed a cardinal sin, wasting beer!
5. You can use drops to carbonate apple cider as well as beer. The measurements are the same to get the same amount of carbonation.
6. Different temperatures will play on how well the carbonation process goes. The yeast in beer generally enjoys a warmer temperature to do its thing - so if you are questioning whether the drops didn't produce enough CO2, bear in mind there are other factors at play such as being too cold! Beer should be kept warm for a few days after adding the sugar. Then move to a cool place. 
7. If you do choose to not use drops and just wish to add granulated sugar to the bottle, we recommend the use of an ordinary kitchen funnel as it speeds things up and helps reduce the mess of sugar going everywhere. You could also consider batch priming your brew. 
8. We once tried using jelly beans as a substitute for carbonation drops. The results were quite interesting! Basically, you can use any form of sugar lollies for carbonating beer - as long as it fits down the neck of the beer you'll be right! You can also use honey!
9. We've used Mangrove Jack's drops many times and had no problems so are very happy to recommend their use.
10. You can use carbonation drops with your ginger beer as well!
11. If you are buying drops online, say Coopers Drops from Amazon, we suggest you order at least a couple of packets - that way the cost for delivery becomes more effective by price per unit.
    
    

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Do I need to use carbonation drops for brewing?

Do I need to use carbonation drops for brewing?

Usually I would try and sell you something when you come to this site but at the end of the day, we are all beer lovers so when some asks if they NEED to use carbonation drops, we're not going to say yes and then try and get you to buy some via this amazingly awesome beer site.

No.

Not this day*.

Today we give nothing but advice!

Do you need to use carbonation drops when bottling beer? 

The answer is no.

All they are is sugar rolled into a ball. Sweet, tasty sugar balls.

You can use sugar from the kitchen instead. I like to use a funnel and a teaspon and boom, the sugar is in the bottles, ready for beer to be added and capped.

But, you can of course use carbonation drops when bottling your homebrew.

This is for the reason of efficiency and convenience. Droping a carbonation drop into a bottle is a very fast method and can be less messy.

You also know precisely how much sugar you are adding to your beer.

It does however cost a lot to buy carbonation drops. In fact, in NZ a bag of carbonation drops (good for one bottling day) cost more that a 1KG bag of ordinary sugar!

You could try and buy them in bulk to make it more cost effective but I have yet to find any drops sold in bulk lots.

So do the maths and use the sugar and funnel method.

Or you could try another handy method and priming your brew with sugar.

Or you could just use jelly beans...

* We lied, just a lil bit.

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