What's the most priming sugar you've used?

JackSmith · 04-11-2011, 03:19 PM

What's the most priming sugar you have ever used per gallon when bottling? If you're trying to go for style-appropriate carbonation levels, you might need to use 1.25 oz. or more of table sugar per gallon of beer to reach ~3.5 volumes. Have you ever used this much priming sugar? How did it turn out? Gushers? Bottle bombs?

Priemus · 04-11-2011, 03:35 PM

Im a real slacker when it comes to changing buckets.

I dont secondary, I dont use a bottling bucket, for that reason I dont bulk prime, I dont want to stirr up sediment in my primary.

So, I prime bottles individually. The most sugar ive ever used was 1 teaspoon per 330ml bottle. I forgot it actually should be approximatly 1 teaspoon per 500ml bottle, which I "normally" use. So those ones were quite over carbed.

Basiocally you open them and they run over the top like a warm bottle of champagne. You may as well drink straight from the bottle cause if you poor into a glass you get nothing but head and the yeast on the bottom is pushed around the moment you pop it so eh, no harm no foul.

So, i guess thats a gusher. But you dont lose more than 1/6 of the bottle when opening.

JackSmith · 04-14-2011, 03:40 PM

Interesting. Even at 1 tsp per 500 ml, that's 1.4 ounces per gallon, unless my math is wrong. That would give you about 3.5 volumes if your beer fermented at 72F. Now if you used 1 tsp per 333ml, you'd be looking at 2.1 oz per gallon, which is about 5 volumes!

What kind of bottles did you prime with 1 tsp per 333ml? None of them burst or broke?

BTW, I'm working with cane sugar, not corn sugar, and using that for my estimates. It's not much different in ppg than corn sugar.

manoaction · 04-14-2011, 03:46 PM

Before kegging, I did bulk priming and I just followed a simple calculator like this one http://www.thescrewybrewer.com/p/brewing-tools-formulas.html#bpc

I had used upwards of 1.4 oz/gal. It was really carbed, but that was the style I was doing. I've never had a bottle bomb.

frailn · 04-14-2011, 04:14 PM

I started experimenting with cane sugar for priming. My last brew was a hefe and I used one cup of Sugar in the Raw for a five gallon batch. It was too much. No gushers or exploding bottles, but it was just a little TOO fizzy. Wife said it was almost like a soda pop.

So, next beer, I cut it back to 3/4 cup of Sugar in the Raw for a five gallon batch. It's bottle conditioning now for the past four days, so I won't know the results for a little while.

JackSmith · 04-14-2011, 04:19 PM

The reason I started this thread is because I recently bottled a Dubbel and primed it to 3.3 volumes. Accounting for residual CO2, I used 7 ounces by weight of table sugar in 5.25 gallons of beer, or 1 1/3 ounces per gallon.

After bottling I started to wonder if the standard long neck brown bottles would be able to handle 3.3 volumes... I bottled as much as I could in those short, bulbous devel-style bottles, but I didn't have enough of them for the full batch.