bottle priming with a pipette

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korndog

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I was thinking about buying a digital pipette for priming up small batches of beer before I force carb, as an alternative to beergunning later. Does anyone have any experience or links where I can get good information as to dosage and procedure?

Thanks
KD
 
I would recommend carb tabs before shelling out the cash for a digital pipette. We have a set in our lab and they are some expensive motha' f'ers. Even regular pipettes are not cheap objects.
 
I would recommend carb tabs before shelling out the cash for a digital pipette. We have a set in our lab and they are some expensive motha' f'ers. Even regular pipettes are not cheap objects.

I was hoping to have better control than the Coopers drops which are a rather high dose. Prime tabs are no longer made. If there are any other products, I would like to know about htem. I have seen some pipettes on ebay for around 20-25 bucks.
 
I know that Munton's also makes a carbonation drop, but I have never personally used them.

I take it you wouldn't want to just add dry sugar to the bottles?

Maybe we need to start buying some pipettes off of ebay...I know our digital one was over $1K.

What volume would you sense you'll be adding? We also use electronic suction pipettes that are used with disposable, sterile pipettes that range in volume from 5ml (actual volume of the pipette, you can still pipette 1ml and such) to 100 ml. I don't think those are too expensive.
 
I know that Munton's also makes a carbonation drop, but I have never personally used them.

What volume would you sense you'll be adding? We also use electronic suction pipettes that are used with disposable, sterile pipettes that range in volume from 5ml (actual volume of the pipette, you can still pipette 1ml and such) to 100 ml. I don't think those are too expensive.

Not sure about the volume or how to even begin this project. i just thought it would be cool to dial in specific volumes of CO2 for differnt styles. It makes it easy to rack to a keg, fill a sixer or two for competitions and then force carb the rest. As great as the beergun is, this sounds like a nicer way to go. Here is a nice article about priming rates, so I guess I can extrapolate from there. Any thoughts?
 
I think you could get a relatively cheap order of simple glass pipettes (quick search led me to 1000 for ~$30) with a fixed volume, and as long as the volume is small enough, which I think 2 mL should be fine, you can calculate how much dextrose you'll need to carb a single beer, multiply it by the total number you want to carb, know the volume of water you'll need to evenly distribute the sugar solution among that quantity of beer, and you're good to go.

Here is an example of a quick and dirty method to do what I think you're talking about. Based on the link you provided, it would take about 0.957 g of dextrose to carb a single beer to 1.5 vol CO2 (I took the first one in the table). Say you wanted to just carb 6 bottles, then you'd need 5.742 g of dextrose. If the total volume of your pipette is 2 mL (like the ones in the link), you'll need a total of around 12 mL. Simply add the sugar to the water and then add the full amount of each pipette (2 mL) to each bottle. When you're done, the solution should be gone, and each beer should have close to the amount of sugar required to carb to 1.5 vol CO2.

Potential annoyances with doing this might be measuring out small quantities of water/dextrose. You could probably do the water volume measurements a little easier by weight instead. A problem in doing it this way is that it'll be a different amount of sugar for different carb levels, but a simple spread sheet would be an easy reference.

Hope that points you in a direction that helps.
 

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