juse

Recipes 

I've been reading about long-term food storage, particularly grains, & one of the techniques that caught my eye was using a piece of dry ice in a 5 gallon bucket, then filling the bucket up 3/4 of the way with dried grain, and then placing a silica gel packet on top. The dry ice melts, turning into CO2 gas, displacing the oxygen, then you seal up the bucket. Stays good for years.

Anyway, I got to thinking, couldn't I use dry ice to carbonate my beer somehow? Has anyone done this or heard of it? Seems like I could put small chunk of it in my bottles right before bottling & it would be ready rather quickly. I guess the cold might crack the bottle, don't know. I know it would kill the yeast.

Is this totally insane, or a good idea?

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FlyGuy

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See here: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/dry-ice-carbonation-video-29448/

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Desert Monkey

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Kinda crazy...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice_bomb

Might be one heck of a bottle bomb -

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juse

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Thanks, FlyGuy/Desert Monkey. I did a search for 'dry ice' before I posted, but it turned up no results. I'll check it out.


Edit:
Okay, I checked it out. Yikes! Nevermind..... sugar works just fine for me.

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Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
~Leonardo da Vinci

"Roses are red, and how do you do? Drink four of these, and Woo woo woo woo!"
~Curly

jay075j

Recipes 

I've heard of people using it to carbonate soda, but I'm not sure if you would want to try it with beer. Sounds like it would be way too hard to try to calculate it out for a good carbonation level. If you were to try it at all, you may want to consider it with a soda keg. Bottles will blow like Monica L.

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Karac

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Kinda missed the boat here but...

Basically if you take one gram of dry ice, it expands to about .83L almost one volume of CO2. I didnt do the math, here is the website:

http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/gases/faq/co2-volume-from-dry-ice.shtml

krops13

Recipes 

What about kegging instead of bottles. You would be able to release pressure if overpressure happens.

malkore

Recipes 

but why? using dry ice to carbonate falls under the "yeah, you could do it, but what do you gain" category. if its an experiment you want to prove, go for it (but you won't be the first).

for practical purposes, its not economical and since you have to pretty precisely measure each piece of dry ice to achieve the right carbonation level while not giving yourself frostbite and also not letting the ice sublimate before you get it capped/sealed.

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JKoravos

Recipes 

+1


What's the point?

pattatat

Recipes 

I would advise against this.

We might have used to play with dry ice and 20oz plastic bottles back in the day..
My friend might have broken 3 bones in his hand from one going off prematurely....