Irish Creme Syrup

We're making our own Irish Pale Ale. To get a good 'Irish' flavor we had the idea of adding Irish Creme Syrup in the secondary. However wasn't sure of just how much of it will ferment out. It's a 8.5 oz bottle. 9 grams of sugar per serving, 16 servings, 144 grams in a bottle... So, a couple questions.

1. How much will this kick start fermentation?
2. How much Alcohol will it add?
3. How much flavor will be lost?
4. If I used some at bottling how much would be recommended?

I figure that it will start fermentation again for about 24 hours at the most (hopefully). I'm thinking of boiling it with some water to sanitize it (it's been opened to taste and has been in the fridge) and rack over it and leave it for the two week secondary period. Before we bottle I was going to taste and see how much flavor was left and see if we needed to use some for bottling. What do you guys think?

Ingredients List:
Organic Evaporated Cane Juice (the hippie food store was the only place we could find it, it is a "first crystallization" sugar made directly from the original cane juice, not from remelted raw sugar. It is essentially the same thing the molecules are the same and just as digestable.)
Purified Water
Organic Flavors
Vegetable Glycerine
Citric Acid

Was also wondering if any of those things would harm the beer.

Ok, so after some research and math i figured out that it has just as much fermentation potential as 5 oz of dextrose... So, theoretically it would be possible to just bottle with it (3/4 cups and water)... However, i think we're going to go ahead and put it into the secondary and see what happens just in case...

sounds interesting, keep us posted

You may want to add small ammounts at a time and taste. It would be pretty horrible to find out it's way to strong, or doesn't combine well with the beer and loose an entire batch.
Some flavor may be driven off, but it's hard to say how much.
Maybe grab a 1 gallon jug. Rack some off and try it in there.



Should be interesting either way.

I was also going to recommend racking off a gallon and testing it in the jug before ruining 5 gals.

D*Bo said:

You may want to add small ammounts at a time and taste. It would be pretty horrible to find out it's way to strong, or doesn't combine well with the beer and loose an entire batch.
Some flavor may be driven off, but it's hard to say how much.
Maybe grab a 1 gallon jug. Rack some off and try it in there.



Should be interesting either way.

Click to expand...

That's a good thought, we'll probably sample some today and put a fraction into it to taste just how much we'll get...

Update:

We found another bottle of irish creme syrup, it had 16 grams per oz or 8 per tbsp, which is less than the other bottle but not by much. We decided after some tasting that the coffee in the newer irish cream was pretty heavy and the sugar in it was clashing with the rest of the beer. After some deliberation we decided that the sweetness will probably ferment out and after some conditioning the coffee would mellow with the rest of the beer. We added about 2/3's of the bottle, the bottle being 25.4 (we added around 16 oz), to half a gallon of water and boiled it then cooled it and racked the beer onto it. Shortly after fermentation kicked up again and is pretty active (i think it was around 10 a minute). We're hoping that when we bottle it in two weeks that the irish creme we added would have mellowed and gave just a slight Irish Creme Flavor. If it's too strong we will just prime with priming sugar if it's pretty light and mellow Irish flavor we're going to use the smaller container of Irish Cream to prime. In our taste test the small bottle of Irish Creme did better than the big. What we're hoping for is the Big and Small bottle to combine together and give a nice Irish Creme kick to the beer without overpowering it... I'm optimistic about it and think it will turn out fantastic. Hopefully the primary taste will come from the small bottle and the background effect will come from the bigger bottle.

Our gravity before primary was 1.071 (60*F) and we fermented down to 1.014 giving us 7.48% ABV. Promash projected it 7.63 and it probably would have reached that had we let it go to 1.012 as projected but we were going to add the syrup and figured it wouldn't hurt anything, now adding the amount of sugar in the syrup to Promash we're looking at about 8.33% ABV :rockin: ... Just hoping the other ingredients in the Syrups will keep it from drying out too badly. I have high hopes...

This along with EdWort's Apfelwein is going to make for a very very fun St. Patricks Day....