Can You Prime With Honey?

Has anyone tried this? Is it even possible or recommended? What if you microwaved the honey to try to kill any potential nasties? I really want to impart some Orange Blossom Honey flavor into a batch and I'm wondering if that would help.

You can, but the amount necessary to prime will be so low that it won't bring much flavor into the beer.

You'd be better off boiling a pound or two during your boil, or add it to the secondary.

M_C

wait untill after the boil

Thanks fellas.

I've heard people say honey is antimicrobial. In any case its osmotic pressure is almost definitely high enough that there shouldn't be any bugs growing in it. (I had a friend who made mead with 30-year-old honey that hadn't "gone bad" in any way in the interim.) But I echo the folks who say add late in the boil or in secondary to actually get any honey characteristics in your beer.

honey contains botulism spores. Are they going to multiply in acidic wort? No. Fact remains if botulism spores are present, what else?

I've primed with honey with solid results. I've also placed honey in the boil (my first batch, didn't know any better) but you'll get better results if you do it during either the cool-down (under 100-110F) or after active fermentation has slowed a little (after the first week at least). Be careful with how much you add to a batch. Using more honey will start to swing your beer more into a braggot. Although, you need to add a significant amount of honey to get to that level (typically 50% of the grist being honey is when you approach it being a braggot).

If you want more honey LIKE flavor, use honey malt. If you want to add a specific type of honey flavor to a brew (honey malt is more generic) then use that type of honey in the actual brew. You don't need to add all the honey during just one stage. So, you COULD put some in the boil (I hear a million bees screaming out all at once), some during cool-down, and some post active fermentation. You can also prime with more.

If you're going to prime with honey, use 1.25x the amount of sugar you would have used to get the same CO2 volumes level for the brew. Do NOT add honey by volume, use WEIGHT measurements ONLY. The only thing going into my brew that's measured by volume is water. Everything else is by weight. So if you were going to add 4oz of corn sugar to prime a 5 gallon batch, use 5oz of honey instead.

I've changed from using honey to dememera/turbinado sugar for the last two batches I've bottled. I'm waiting for these to be carbonated before forming an opinion of the differences. I'll probably have another batch bottled, before I open up the first one primed this way.

For those saying you won't notice the flavor addition from honey, it all depends on the brew, and your pallet... I'm sure a good share of people won't notice any difference. But some will notice a little something different... They might not be able to place it until you tell them how you primed the batch.

I suggest experimenting with using different priming sugars until you find one you really like, and get solid results with. After all, just because something is accepted by the masses, doesn't mean it's the only way to do things. I would just make sure you use a sugar that CAN be fermented...

Honey is "antimicrobial" in two respects. Firstly, because it's "dry", that is, a very highly concentrated and containing little water, it dessicates by osmosis microorganisms it comes into contact with. Secondly, it contains a small amount of hydrogen peroxide. Although it kills many organisms, wild yeasts do survive in honey, and they are likely to be present in "pure" honey, although perhaps not in the sterilized garbage you find filling most grocers' shelves. For technical information from the National Honey Board about how to use honey in homebrewing, see http://www.honey.com/images/downloads/home_brew.pdf.

+1 to Golddiggie

I would also add that the sugar content in honey is not consistent, even by weight, but as homebrewers we have a tool that can help us get consistent results with honey, and that is a hydrometer! Mix the honey with boiled water until you get the gravity you want (I'm not sure what that is, but I know there are calculations for knowing how much sugar there is in the solution based on the gravity) and then use that to prime the beer. This will give you the most consistent and repeatable results with honey. If you don't want to boil the honey you can always boil the water first and then add the honey while it is till very warm, just be very sanitary.

Probably better to use a refractometer than a hydrometer... That way you only use a tiny sample.. I would be careful with this method though, unless you have a priming sugar solution results to use as a baseline, and reduce the amount of water added to the honey to compensate for that difference too...

I do find that the 1.25x factor is close enough for the home brewer level. I probably wouldn't want to do it on any large scale, or for a commercial level brew...