Using a priming sugar calculator

I want to bottle my Brown Shugga clone tonight and I'm going to use brown sugar to prime. When I use the following calculator what do I put in as the temperature? I ended fermentation at about 70 and it has now been cold crashed for about 4 days. I'm assuming the fermentation temp since there shouldn't be any co2 produced after fermentation and during the cold crash. http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html

EllisTX said:

I want to bottle my Brown Shugga clone tonight and I'm going to use brown sugar to prime. When I use the following calculator what do I put in as the temperature? I ended fermentation at about 70 and it has now been cold crashed for about 4 days. I'm assuming the fermentation temp since there shouldn't be any co2 produced after fermentation and during the cold crash. http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html

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Use the highest temperature the beer reached at or after the fermentation. If 70 was the highest the beer reached, then use 70 degrees.

I use the highest temp it's been at since fermentation finished. The reason is that once you raise the temperature, it will outgas co2. If you lower the temp after that, it will not produce more co2. So if 70 is the highest temp it's been at since fermentation, I'd use that.

Thanks Yooper. I was a bit confused because this calculator says "current temperature". http://www.northernbrewer.com/priming

I assumed that it would be the fermentation temp though. I just needed my nerves settled.

I don't bother with temperature at all. All those calculators do is overcomplicate a simple, mostly irrelevant issue.

The amount of C02 dissolved from fermentation is negligible anyway and I feel that will all the racking and what not a lot of C02 will be off gassed anyway.

Germelli1 said:

I don't bother with temperature at all. All those calculators do is overcomplicate a simple, mostly irrelevant issue.

The amount of C02 dissolved from fermentation is negligible anyway and I feel that will all the racking and what not a lot of C02 will be off gassed anyway.

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I agree, actually. Unless I have a reason to carb particularly low (or high), I just use one ounce of priming sugar per gallon of beer. But I realize that many brewers use those calculators.

They are flawed, because they ask for "current temperature". In a lager, especially, that's silly because sometimes a diacetyl rest is done as high as 68-70 degrees! As long as the brewer recognizes to use the highest temperature, it'll be fine. But more than a couple of brewers here on the forum have posted that they used "1.5 ounces of priming sugar in my lager and it isn't carbing!" because they put 34 degrees in as the beer temperature. Ouch. It hasn't carbed. And it never will.

I was going to add a caveat for lagers, but decided not to. Even those when done by the standard method including a diacetyl rest would negate the temperature correction.

The temperature correction parts of the priming calculations are just not important and provide a negligible difference in priming calculations!