Anyone Ever Try This?

Has anyone ever tried skipping the 'priming' stage of bottling by simply timing the bottling so that you are capping not-quite-done-fermenting beer? If the timing is right, you should be able to have the beer finish fermenting out, and get carbonation. Though you'd probably have to let a beer like this age for a longer time for flavors sake.

I don't think I'm ever going to try doing this, but I had the thought, and had to ask :fro:

5gB

I might consider this with a keg (probably not) but I would be too worried about bottle bombs to try it with bottles. Priming adds about 2 gravity points so you need to bottle the beer when there are 2 points left to ferment for proper carbonation without bombs. Can you know accurately enough what your FG is going to be?
Now adding fermenting beer to a beer just about to be bottled is a technique that is better understood and more likely to be successful.

Craig

The problem is I don't think most brewers here have enough control over their fermentations to reliably predict where the beer will end up. However, with a good finishing hydrometer, of course, it's theoretically possible.

I think a similar and more predictable technique would be to bottle with krausen from a simultaneously fermenting batch. For example, if you have two pale ales, one done with secondary and one at high krausen, you could siphon off a measured amount of the wort in primary, measure the SG, calculate SG * volume to determine how much sugar you have, and or subtract a little wort to compensate, and then bottle.

I know an HBTer or two has tried that technique and I know some commercial breweries do it as well. It strikes me as being substantially more predictable because the yeast is being mixed with a yeast with a known terminal gravity... and the wort being added is a smaller proportion of the whole amount in secondary, so there is less opportunity to miscalculate your expected FG.

I can see the value in priming with high-krausen wort. I cannot, however, see the value of doing this unless you have a REALLY nice set up that is well protected from risks of infections. With couple of siphon tubes and an open bottling bucket thrown into the mix, I don't think the risks are worth the rewards.