What's the easiest way to force carb on a few bottles?

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mmonacel

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I'm looking to submit some entries for the NHC and I'd like to submit some sours / lambics. However I only want to submit a few bottles worth and leave the remainder in the carboys to continue to age. Any suggestions on the best method? A carbonation cap is the only one I can think of. Any others?
 
If you're set on force carbing, that sounds like the only way to do it. I assume you'd move it to a 2-liter plastic bottle, carb up, then back to a glass bottle? Assuming you've got a keg, you could always transfer the whole batch with yeast cake to a keg, force carb at room temp while tilting the keg away from the diptube, and bottle from there. Then you could continue to age in the keg until you thought it was ready, maybe move it to another keg to get rid of the cake at that point.

You could also always just add priming sugar to each bottle (either in the form of carb drops, or carefully measured sugar) and let them carb naturally, if you've got the time (maybe throw in a few grains of yeast if you think they've been sitting too long). I've seen people talk about trying dry ice to carb bottles, but that always seemed like a good way to at best ruin some beer, and at worst explode shards of glass everywhere, but maybe someone has figured out a good method for calculating and weighing.
 
Thanks. I would normally just use priming sugar but sours take forever to carb up naturally and I'd like to submit to the NHC. The transfer from 2L bottle to a 12 oz sounds hairy but if I keep it really cold and carb a bit more than my target I'm guessing I'll be OK.
 
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