zodiak3000
Well-Known Member
when adding priming sugar to each individual bottle, is it best to shake up the bottle after capping, or just leaving it, or does it really matter?..
Not sure, but it's way easier to boil about a cup of water and dissolve the corn sugar in it. Dump this into your bottling bucket and rack the beer on top of it. This gets the sugar evenly distributed.
Not sure, but it's way easier to boil about a cup of water and dissolve the corn sugar in it. Dump this into your bottling bucket and rack the beer on top of it. This gets the sugar evenly distributed.
If you are fermenting in your bottling bucket, and you add the priming sugar to it and stir it up, all of the "stuff" that settled out after fermentation like dead yeast, hops debris, proteins, etc, will be all stirred up again. So, you don't want to do that. Also, the bottling spigot is near the bottom, so it'll probably be plugged up with trub initially. You don't want that stuff in your bottles!
I'd recommend buying a dedicated bottling bucket. Or at least, siphon your brew out of the fermenter to bottle it.
this is my first brew and i want to make this process as easy as possible for the first time. is there really anything wrong with just bottling my beer from the bottling bucket and adding sugar to each individual bottle? is there a noticable amount of sediment that makes the beer nasty when using this method?
Well, you can definitely do that. You will get quite a bit of sediment, and by adding sugar directly to each bottle, you may get some foaming when you're trying to fill the bottles. (To see what I mean, add a teaspoon of sugar to a beer that you've just poured). You may not have problems, but sometimes adding a solid (like sugar) to a liquid can cause multiple nucleation points.
The sediment will fall to the bottom in the bottles eventually, but most people don't like that much sediment in there. The trub does taste bad, so you're not going to want to drink it.
The easiest thing to do is to siphon the beer to a new sanitized bottling bucket into which the priming solution (sugar dissolved in boiling water) has been added. Then, using a bottling wand fill each bottle. It's actually easier to this than to try to add sugar to each bottle and fill individually. Especially if you don't have an accurate scale to carefully measure the amount of sugar you're putting in each bottle, and having the trub still in the beer since you haven't siphoned.
sounds good, i guess i should just try this method then. i have a siphon, i just never used it. how much water and sugar do you boil together to add to the 5 gallon bottling bucket? and i add this priming solution to the bucket and just siphon the beer on top, right? no need to stir or let it sit?
I use 2 cups of boiling water for the 5 ounces (by weight) of priming sugar. If you siphon from the primary fermenter, and put the tip of the tubing in a circular manner along the bottom of the receiving vessel, it'll "swirl" to mix. It won't hurt if you want to sanitize a long handled spoon and give it a stir, however. I never stir, but I know some people do.
Be careful not to splash your beer as you siphon it, and fill the bottles. If you have a bottling wand, that is very helpful.
Enter your email address to join: