Bottling, how much spray malt to add?

Hi, my first brew is ready to bottle but I could only get hold of 1500ml wine bottles for now, the instructions say when bottling I should add 1 rounded teaspoon of sugar or malt for 750ml bottles, so does that mean I add 2 teaspoons for 1500ml?

hopefully I can get some smaller bottles for the next brew.

Are you sure they'll hold up to being pressurised from the carbonation?? How are you going to cap/seal them? You might be better getting hold of PET soda/carbonated beverage bottles to use this time.

Plain sugar ferments out/attenuates 100% and I think DME/spray malt is something like 75%. So you'd need about 1 & a 1/4tsp of DME to equal 1 tsp sugar. It'd be easier to do batch priming. For a five gallon brew I tend to use 5 Oz sugar, which, I think, would equate to about 6.25 Oz spray malt, mixed with 2 cups of boiled water, allow to cool, add to bottling bucket and rack the brew on top of the priming solution.

Here's a link to the Northern Brewer priming calculator;

http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator/

I'm not sure if they will hold the pressure they are just normal wine bottles with screw on lid, I think they should be fine but this is my first attempt at brewing and bottles are to expensive in the UK. My local pub is saving me some proper beer bottles for the next batch.

I don't think screw on caps on glass bottles will hold the carbonation. You'll brew better off letting your beer in the primary for another week until you can get the real bottles you need. Or go get a case of beer and some friends to help you empty it, to speed the process along.

How much are bottles there? They are like 14 a case here, which i think is a rip off, considering you can get a case of full bottles for 20

Do NOT use wine bottles! They are not designed to hold pressure and will blow up. Not maybe, they WILL, unless they are champagne bottles.

Oh best wait then

I got 50 1 pint bottles from the pub how much malt should I add to these?

By the way malt on cornflakes is really nice.

Matt3989 500ml bottles are about £16 for 24 thats about $25 I think.

Also if the bottles explode do they really explode with glass flying across the room?

Yes. Sometimes that will happen, glass will fly all over the room along with beer, which makes a nice, sticky mess. Sometimes just the cap pops off and creates an equally sticky mess.

Andromedoh said:

I got 50 1 pint bottles from the pub how much malt should I add to these?

By the way malt on cornflakes is really nice.

Matt3989 500ml bottles are about £16 for 24 thats about $25 I think.

Also if the bottles explode do they really explode with glass flying across the room?

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If you can swing it, I'd recommend doing batch priming rather than adding sugar to each bottle. It's much easier in every way. Just bring about 3 cups of water to a boil and add the quantity of sugar or malt that you need. Boil it gently for 10-15 minutes and you should have 1.5-2 cups of liquid left (based on my experience, it probably varies). Let it cool a bit and pour it into your bottling bucket and rack on top of that, then bottle. (Some people like to stir gently, but I've had good luck just racking on.)

This site has a good calculator: http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html It will give you quantities (by weight) for corn sugar (dextrose), table sugar (sucrose), and a few varieties of DME.

If you want to go by the seat of your pants, Papazian suggests (IIRC) about 1C of DME for a 5 gallon batch. But that's pretty imprecise in many ways.

Be careful about accepting recommendations from this site (or the linked calculators) for priming sugar calculations. Your teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, pints and gallons are different to the American equivalents, but grams and ounces (but not fluid ounces) are the same.
Also, the linked calculators give unacceptably low levels of carbonation for bottled beers for English beers.
i.e. If you are bottling an English Bitter, you will want about 2.5 volumes CO2, not the 0.75 - 1.5 volumes suggested by the calculators.

-a.

ajf said:

Be careful about accepting recommendations from this site (or the linked calculators) for priming sugar calculations. Your teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, pints and gallons are different to the American equivalents, but grams and ounces (but not fluid ounces) are the same.
Also, the linked calculators give unacceptably low levels of carbonation for bottled beers for English beers.
i.e. If you are bottling an English Bitter, you will want about 2.5 volumes CO2, not the 0.75 - 1.5 volumes suggested by the calculators.

-a.

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I agree. I HATE those calculators, because to carb to style in some cases, they recommend something like 1.00 volumes. Well, that might be "to style" for cask beer, but that means the beer is flat, just like out of the fermenter. It's not "to style" for bottled beer, which tend to be 2.3-2.6 volumes for all styles.

Also, all priming additions should always be made by weight and never by cups/teaspoons. It's really important to measure by weight when dealing with things like this. If you don't have a small kitchen scale, get one or buy your priming sugar already premeasured so you know what you're dealing with.

If you're adding the priming sugar right to the bottle instead of dissolving it in water and using a bottling bucket, use corn sugar so you can more easily add the correct amount and forget the DME to prime.

zeg said:

If you can swing it, I'd recommend doing batch priming rather than adding sugar to each bottle. It's much easier in every way.

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+1 on the batch priming. You get even priming across the batch and you will know what to expect. Us kits usually come with 5oz of corn sugar for a 5 gallon batch which is a good amount give or take a few grams depending on the beer style you're brewing. Don't guess use a calculator like http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming-sugar-calculator/ this will tell you exactly what you need for priming. Also even if you do decide on wine bottles which may or may not blow up, the typical wine screw tops def won't hold carbonation pressure and you will wind up with flat beer or bottle bombs. If you can't get beer bottles go with the soda bottles.

Also when batch priming 5oz of sugar i usually use 1 cup of water and boil the mixture till all the sugar dissolves into syrup and the syrup clears from milky white. This usually takes between 5 - 10 minutes boil tome.