Beersmith's Carbonation Tool

[wsmith1625]

I'm planning to naturally carbonate my next batch of beer in the keg and need to calculate how much corn sugar to add to a 5 gal batch. Beersmith is giving 2 different volumes, one for bottling and one for kegging. None of the other calculators I looked at do this. Can someone explain?

 

[doug293cz]

There is no difference between natural carbonation in bottles or kegs. After all, a keg is nothing but a big bottle. In both cases the headspace is about 6% of the beer volume. Sometime in the past, someone thought that they behaved differently, so needed different amounts of priming sugar to get the same results. And, this idea became widespread, and took on a life of its own. But, according to simple chemistry, this is total nonsense. I have never found anyone who can give a rational explanation how a difference could be possible. Just use the values calculated for bottling. If you use the value for kegging, you will end up under-carbed, but once you put it on CO2 gas at the appropriate pressure, it will self correct.

Brew on

 

[wsmith1625]

There is no difference between natural carbonation in bottles or kegs. After all, a keg is nothing but a big bottle. In both cases the headspace is about 6% of the beer volume. Sometime in the past, someone thought that they behaved differently, so needed different amounts of priming sugar to get the same results. And, this idea became widespread, and took on a life of its own. But, according to simple chemistry, this is total nonsense. I have never found anyone who can give a rational explanation how a difference could be possible. Just use the values calculated for bottling. If you use the value for kegging, you will end up under-carbed, but once you put it on CO2 gas at the appropriate pressure, it will self correct.

Brew on

Thanks for that answer. The science didn't make sense to me either, but I'm not a scientist.

 

[OakIslandBrewery]

Brewers Friend also has a calculator to use. I use Beer Smith also but sometimes it's good to compare the results of one with another.