Dry Ice Carbination

This may seem like a nonsense question, so I am putting it in the Beginner Forum.

Has anyone ever thought of or tried carbinating their beer with dry ice? My girlfriend works in a laboratory and has access to dry ice, and we've sucessfully carbinated pure water and iced tea. I noticed that as long as there was enough liquid, the dry ice cubes would just evaporate and the solvent wouldn't freeze at all. Just throwing that idea out there to see what anyone has to say.

l3lackEyedAngels said:

This may seem like a nonsense question, so I am putting it in the Beginner Forum.

Has anyone ever thought of or tried carbinating their beer with dry ice? My girlfriend works in a laboratory and has access to dry ice, and we've sucessfully carbinated pure water and iced tea. I noticed that as long as there was enough liquid, the dry ice cubes would just evaporate and the solvent wouldn't freeze at all. Just throwing that idea out there to see what anyone has to say.

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I've wondered the same thing...
anybody tried it?

ws

I brought this up one time when discussing how to make root beer in bottles without adding yeast and producing alcohol. (The root beer would be for my 3 year old son.)

The consenus (which I agreed with) was that it would be hard to find the right amount to use per bottle, and trial-and-error methods of trying to figure it out would be potentially dangerous (exploding bottles if too much dry ice is used.)

In theory, it should work fine. I just don't want to shred my hands or face trying to do it.

I'd steer clear of that idea. It would be pretty easy to screw up the ratio.

In my younger days I made some pretty impressive explosions with dry ice, liquid, and a sealed container, and you'd be surprised how little dry ice you need. Be safe!

Seems to me that one should be able to do that math and figure out the approriate volume to use for a given volume of beer. What volume of gas is given up by 1 gram of dry ice?

Fears of exploding bottles could be handled easily: keg it instead. The pressure release valve will blow long before the sidewalls dangerously rupture.

And you could experiement with carbonation using water to start with. Once you've perfected the process then introduce beer.

Yea I would be very careful when experimenting. Me and....err these people I used to know would put dry ice into 2 liter bottles just to watch it go boom, when we....err they were alot younger.

From what I was told, It was a huge explosion.

The experiment gets very safe when you a) do the math ahead of time and b) use a container with a pressure release valve (keg).

Heck--- when I was a kid I made 'hand grenades' using one liter glass bottles, glue, a drill, bicycle inner tube valves and an air compressor.

kornkob said:

And you could experiement with carbonation using water to start with. Once you've perfected the process then introduce beer.

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assuming someone is trying to do this with bottles....

If you perfect the process with water, and then switch to using beer.... how do you account for the CO2 already in the beer naturally from fermentation that was not in the water you used to perfect the idea?

This is the kind of honest, simple oversight that could lead to a disaster.

-walker

Well, once you have the amount needed to carb water, you sliver that down to 5% or 10% of that amount and try carbing a beer (beer is no where near 90% carbonated through fermenation). Then work up from there until it is appropriately carbonated. Now you know what is needed.

To make the bottle testing process safer yet, use PET bottles for your experiement and handle them wearing appropriate safety gear (gloves, face protection, etc).

Still seems to me that the safest way to do it is to use kegs--- if you want to bottle the results, use a coutnerpressure bottler or a Beer Gun.

However, I doubt that that naturally occurring CO2 in fermented beer in a carboy is really all that much.

Perhaps the dry ice could be put in the bucket right before bottling instead of the sugar primer. After the ice boils off, bottle as usual. No danger of explosion, since the bucket has an open lid, and over or under carbination could be fixed with some math and some practice.

BTW, I have zero experience in brewing; this is all just me daydreaming instead of studying for finals...

No-- if the dry ice is added then, the CO2 will not stay in solution. It has to be in a container to force it into the beer.

One time in high school, my friend's parents bought some dry ice for a halloween party. We took some of it and, with the help of a couple half-empty soda bottles, blew up a couple of mail boxes.

Ahh, teenaged vandalism. And mailboxes really are the baby-seals of the suburban landscape.

I think the best place for dry ice in the homebrewers repertoire would be to know EXACTLY how much carbonation you are adding to the keg. But you would need to weigh the dry ice to the gram, or tighter. I did the math once, but didn't write it down. 3 1/2 oz per 5 gallons??? Or you could use the weight of the keg, before and after force carbonating with gas, but who's got a scale that goes to 50#, accurate to one gram?

Now that I found a fridge(in a vacant lot), I may keg the next batch, perhaps I'll try it.

Very cool, casebrew! Be sure to let us know how it works out!

Apologies for the double post, but I have a related question:

If there isn't enough dry ice added to freeze the beer, but enough to cool the beer down, would the temperature drop affect the taste of the beer? This is assuming that the ice is added to the bottles or keg during bottling or kegging.

I'll add my, "added dry ice to a plastic gatorade bottle, and 15 minutes later heard a shotgun go off behind us, only to see the bottle about 50 feet straight up"

I think you would have to do some complicated math including some moles and expansion coefficients... long since forgotten how that would work, but pressurizing via CO2 bottle would probably be a safer, easier route since you're not dealing with temperature differences and expansions... but you could always guess and check just be prepared for some random BOOMS might actually be more fun that way.

Ya, is it really worth doing? Carboonation is carbonation and so on, if it isn't broken why fix it, you know?

Here's an idea: would liquid nitrogen have a similar effect? It would be great to have that guiness flow to a stout.

kornkob said:

Heck--- when I was a kid I made 'hand grenades' using one liter glass bottles, glue, a drill, bicycle inner tube valves and an air compressor.

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so did you have to throw it with the compressor attached, or how did that work???

and +1 for dry ice plus wee bit of water in 2l pop bottles.

ahoym8e said:

so did you have to throw it with the compressor attached, or how did that work???

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glass screw top bottle. Drill hole in bottle cap the size of the inner tube valve. Cut inner tube valve off of inner tube so that there is enough rubber to cover the inside of the bottle cap. Take epoxy and glue valve into cap and cap onto bottle. Put 150-200 psi in the bottle.


Climb on your bike with 2 or 3 of these in one hand pedal down to the nearby rail corridor and hunt rabbits and other animals (unsuccessfully) with them.





Look back on it later and wonder why you didn't get dead much sooner.

Using dry ice to carbonate-- an interesting experiement but I would not try it with bottles or any other container that does not have a pressure relief valve. In a keg? Heck-- I'd probably try it f I could get my hands around the data to make a good choice on the amount and had a ready supply of the stuff.

You could also hold one of those CO2 filled cartridges in the batch, and poke a hole in it, and then bottle it all really really fast.

I'm sorry gang, but the idea of force-carbonating via measured chunks of dry ice makes about as much sense to me as drinking Budweiser.

Sasquatch said:

about as much sense to me as drinking Budweiser.

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Which you have done, but don't like to talk about...

Hey, go contact your user or something, Disney boy.

My user is the MCP.

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