Should be fine. The 7 minutes blanching and 7 minutes boiling in brine seems a bit high. Beans, as you know can be many sizes. Here, I grow yellow waxed beans and usualy like to give the plants a few days to produce more and larger sized ones. Filling the jars with whole, vs. cut up beans can also make them take up less space in the jars. Let them 'mellow' about a week before tasting. They brine needs to soak into the beans. There is also Lind Lou's dilly bean recipe, which calls for dill seed heads and weed, and garlic. Ran out of brine?? How much did you make initially? If it was under 2 pints total (1 pint water 1 pint vinegar), you may have measured wrong. With this amount, the result may fill pint 3 jars, but also consider what is lost in steam during the boiling. Hope they aren't to salty!! The Mrs. Wages Quick Process Dill Pickle Mix comes in to sizes. The 5 ounce and the 9+ ounce. The later makes up to 10-12 quarts of dills.

You may have packed the beans too tightly. Even though it's not as "pretty," for safety the beans need to be well surrounded by brine.

It's the same with other low-acid pickled products. If you made sliced pickled beets you wouldn't want to stack them like lumber but just loosely drop them into the jar.

I confess I've never been very successful in matching the amount of brine to the recipe. Usually I increase the amount by half and if there's extra just keep for the next batch (refrigerated).

Carol

Thanks for the help... I confess that I more than likely packed them too much. Either way they are suprisingly crunchy yet but the recipe called for sugar and even though I cut way back on it they still have too much sweetness to them.

May end up dumping them and trying a "dilly beans" recipe from here...

Thanks