How much priming sugar to carbonate an unknown amount of homebrew?

hey folks,

I brewed a batch of belgian blond yesterday. I usually collect 6 gallons preboil, and am left with 5.5 gallons of wort afterwards. Yesterday, I ended up with exactly 5 gallons of wort post-boil, and also lost a lot of wort to the trub & leaf hops when transferring to the carboy.

So now I am stuck with a carboy filled with a volume that is definitely less than 5 gallons. maybe 4? How do I go about adding a safe amount of priming sugar to this batch when I bottle?

1 ounce priming sugar per gallon is the standard.

But Im not sure how many gallons I have

You could always use prime tabs. Venezia & Company, LLC

dsuarez said:

But Im not sure how many gallons I have

Click to expand...

Calibrate your bottling bucket with a sharpy pen. Mark each gallon to 3 gallons, then graduate to quart lines. When you rack you will then know how much you have to the nearest quart. Then do the math.

I suppose it depends how accurate you want to be. Obviously you have a pretty good idea how much wort you have. I'd dump a little less dextrose than you would for 5 gallons and call it good.

Prime to five gallons... the ammount of pressure produced would not be considerablly differnt to cause bottle bombs as long as you dont loose say more then another half gallon or so... putting in 5oz in a four gallon batch will change your out put by less then 20% higher... now in a 3 gallon batch youd be looking at a change around 50-55% which might cause over carbination and bottle bombs... but the differnce between 5 and 4.5 is negliable i would say less then 12% higher then if you calculated it out exactally and just put in 4.5 oz... so as long as you not looking at under 4 gallons then go ahead and put in 5 oz it wont kill you

Cheers

I often weigh my carboys to determine how much I actually end up with. Compare your weight while holding an empty to your weight holding a full carboy. Then do a little figurin'.