Carbing Question...

So I realized that I made a rookie mistake today and forgot to top off my beer. Rather than mess with it and possibly destroy it, I'm going to wait it out and just take the reduced volume and the upped ABV (poor me ). The question now is: when it comes time for bottling how much sugar do I use? The kit (Midwest Irish Stout W/1084) came with a bag of priming sugar, but I assume I don't use the whole thing now. How much should I use 3 oz or so? I don't want to overcarb it, as I don't want it to seem thin.

Thanks!

So how much Wort do you have fermenting? Seems like if you didn't top off to 5gals then that beer is gonna be super strong.

The most important piece of information here is how much is in the carboy/bucket, and whether any water was added to the wort.

Also, what was the OG? That and the volume you're fermenting are the important factors. You can figure out carbonation volumes from that. Sounds like ya took RDWHAHB a tad too seriously with this batch, eh?

When I top off, it is about 36 oz max, as long as your FG is 1.015 or less, you are golden. Put all the priming sugar (3/4 cup for a 5 gallon batch). Make SURE the FG is in order, most important, or beer-grenades (exploding bottles) is possible.
Happy brewing.

I always refer to this site (my LHBS, at least the one that has a clue).

http://www.defalcos.com/brewing-information/first-batch-of-beer.html

Haha! Yep, I'm rather carefree with rules and procedure. This is my first batch of beer, but I've been cooking and baking for 15 years or so both professionally and in my kitchen. Maybe I'm a little too lax, but my results are always good. There are about 4.25 gal in the primary. The abv was pretty weak in the five gal batch (~4.3 I think) so this shouldn't be ultra high or anything. I'm now visiting my parents in SC, so I'm away from my notes but I think OG was ~1.057. I remember distinctly that it was under 1.060.

Thanks all for your help!

Oh, and yes I did top off, just not enough. I didn't think i would lose that much over a gallon. That is the real reason for the mistake. I did it, but didn't pay enough attention. Par for the course.

This is what I use anytime I need to naturally carbonate. It will let you dial in the right amount of carbonation per style.
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

Sweet! Knew there had to be something like that somewhere.

NordeastBrewer77 said:

Also, what was the OG? That and the volume you're fermenting are the important factors. You can figure out carbonation volumes from that. Sounds like ya took RDWHAHB a tad too seriously with this batch, eh?

Click to expand...

Well, actually, the two things you need to know for carbonation are the volume of beer, and the current temperature of the beer. The colder it is, the more CO2 it will store in solution. I'd love to help you on an exact calculation, but I just use the carbonation formulas in Beer Alchemy.

You need the gravity readings to make sure the beer is finished fermenting, but I really don't think they will come into play with CO2.

My advice is to find a calculator that takes temperature into consideration for priming rates, and round down on the volume you expect to bottle. In other words, you may see that there is 4.25 gallons in the primary, but at least 1-1.5 qts of that is yeast and trub, which will be left behind. It would be safer to use 4 gallons for calculation purposes.

Bottle conditioning is actually a tricky thing, because you really only have one shot to get it right. If you just want the beer to be carbonated, then ~4-5 oz of sugar will get the job done, but if you are trying to get an exact and repeatable volume of CO2, then there are other factors that need to be considered.

Joe

sagnew440 said:

This is what I use anytime I need to naturally carbonate. It will let you dial in the right amount of carbonation per style.
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

Click to expand...

It's telling me to use 8.3 oz of corn sugar for a dunkelweizen (at 3.9 volumes)

Is that right? Do you need extra strong bottles to carb that much so they don't all explode?