Priming Sugar v. DME for carbing a dry irish stout

I'm going to bottle a dry Irish stout tonight which I want to have ready for St. Patrick's day.

Now I know that the carbination in a Guinness is due to nitrogen, and since I'm bottling there is no easy way to recreate it.

Usually I bottle with dme but I want this beer ready for St. Patrick's Day, and it seems that the only way I can do that is with priming sugar.

I normally use DME because I believe that it produces a better carbonation (smaller bubbles, etc.) but that's only based on my own experience and other anecdotal evidence.

Will I be sacrificing anything by using priming sugar instead of dme for this dry stout? Would one produce better carbonation for this style than the other? Thanks.

I can't say that I have tried DME to carb, so I don't have a good baseline for comparison. What I can say is the last Irish stout I made was carbed with corn sugar and I was very happy with the results. If you don't plan to drink all of it on St. Patrick's day you could always bottle half w/DME and half w/corn sugar, it would be really interesting to try the two sided by side.

rune- Originally I was going to go that route with half dme/half priming sugar but I started bottling way later last night than originally planned and I didn't want to deal with splitting the batch up. I'll definitely have to do that test in the future though.

What I ended up doing was using priming sugar. Based on my understanding the carbonation might not be quite as good as I would get with dme but I haven't found a source that definitively states which priming agent works best so I'll just wait and see.

To figure out how much priming sugar that I needed I used the carbonation calculator here: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html.

I expected to end up with 4.75 gallons of beer, I decided to go with the higher end of the carbonation (2 volumes), and the calculator told me to go with 73 grams of priming sugar. I actually ended up with a little more than 5 gallons of beer so the carbonation will be a little bit less than I planned but still on the higher end for the style.

Hope my experience helps someone else out.

brewinginct said:

rune- Originally I was going to go that route with half dme/half priming sugar but I started bottling way later last night than originally planned and I didn't want to deal with splitting the batch up. I'll definitely have to do that test in the future though.

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I'll keep an eye out for the thread, and I just might do the same. I've always been curious which primer was better it would be really cool to see a batch split between the two. Now that I keep DME around for starters I might just switch over for the beers that I bottle condition for a long time.

brewinginct said:

I expected to end up with 4.75 gallons of beer, I decided to go with the higher end of the carbonation (2 volumes), and the calculator told me to go with 73 grams of priming sugar. I actually ended up with a little more than 5 gallons of beer so the carbonation will be a little bit less than I planned but still on the higher end for the style.

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73 grams into 5.1 gal should be ~ 1.83 volumes which I think is good for an Irish stout. I carbed mine a little low (1.7) so I wouldn't worry, it should come out great!