Carbonation
 

With co2 forced carbonations do i still need to add the priming sugar?

What are the basic steps to complete this process? Thanks for your help.

NO! With a forced carb you do not need to add priming sugar.

Methods vary, depending on how fast you want to drink your prize. I prefer this method:
1. Chill keg.
2. Crank up CO2 to 30 psi and let the keg sit for 2 days.

You can also just set the pressure at 10 psi or so and let it sit for a week. That usually gives it enought time to absorb the CO2. I find this method is a little bit more "miss" than "hit" though.

do you leave the co2 conected at 30psi or just get the pressure up to 30?

Leave it connected at 30 psi for 48 hours, then bleed the pressure, and run it at 6-12 psi for serving pressure. If you find you have too much carbonation, you can bleed off the pressure every few hours (while disconnected) and it will even out.

Using the method you dislike - carbonating/serving at the desired pressure - will ALWAYS be hit and NEVER miss. The tables don't lie. If the carbonation level isn't what you want, you misjudged how much carbonation you wanted in the first place!

Anyone ever use one of those "carbonating stones"? Does that go more toward the crank and go method or the slow and low technique?

What I meant was, using that method I'm never sure how long its going to take. With the 30 psi for 2 days method, I know I'll have carbonated beer, and its gonna be real close to what I want. The other method has me waiting a week or more and sometimes it isn't ready when I need it to be.

Correct me if I'm wrong--but you are talking "balancing", which is a whole different ball of wax and isn't what I was suggesting to do in my post. It was a general how to carbonate question.

A carbonation stone can be used with the "set it and forget it" method, but it does greatly reduce the amount of time needed for the beer to carbonate. Using one of these stones is much more preferable than cranking up the pressure, shaking the heck out of the keg, then dialing it down and trying to guess where you are in the carbonation level.

The problem is that you almost always will either be over- or under-carbonated using the high pressure/shake method; usually the results are very over-carbonated glasses of foam.

Yes, I admit that if you use the one pressure method, you have to wait up to a week (and I've never had to wait more than five days, by the way), but since beer is better as it ages this isn't a bad thing.

Oh, and no, this has nothing to do with balancing the pressure in the keg to the pressure in the serving lines.

You can set the pressure at 12 PSI or whatever the tables say *and* shake if you want to speed things up a bit. It'll help the CO2 absorb more quickly without the guesswork of the 30 PSI method.