Lawrence Brewers Guild

Jensen may find this interesting since he reloads ammunition

Doing a Belgian at 4 vol CO2 carbonation.

These are heavy high pressure bottles!

57 (330) ml bottles

4 volumes of CO2 at 65 degrees F equals 8.3 ounces or 235.3 grams.

235 g / 57 = 4.12 grams

So what does 4 grams equal with a teaspoon measure? 1 teaspoon and 1/4 teaspoon of corn sugar.

Set my weight scale up with a plastic bowl and adjusted the tare. Dumped 10 charges of sugar into the bowl with the technique of scooping with the spoons.

Weighed out 235 grams of sugar. Charged each bottle. In 57 bottles, I was 1/4 teaspoon short of the weighed amount.

Corn sugar works pretty good with a volume measure.

Very interesting indeed. I weigh out each load by the grain weight (time consuming, but extremely accurate, and piece of mind). That being said, I wouldn't mind getting a charge thrower just for bottle conditioning. Sounds like the corn sugar might throw pretty accurate loads!

Hope to share one of the bottles with you!

A powder charge thrower was what I was thinking about but I doubt that I would ever build one.

I had noticed when baking that granulated sugar works very well with volume so I don't weigh it anymore either.

Taking the exercise a step farther, how about left over beer that doesn't fit into a keg from the fermenter. Collect the extra beer in a jug for later use.

Beersmith has the tools, if you think about it or use a conversion calculator.

In Beersmith, click on the Carbonation button. Assume 3 volumes, the beer is at 60 degrees F, type in 12 oz (.09 gallon). The weight for corn sugar is shown as .10 ounces. If you work in ounces, you can stop here and charge your 12 ounce bottle with .10 ounces of sugar.

If you work in metric, click on the Weight conversion button and type in .10 in the ounces window and read the metric conversion.

Charge you bottle with corn sugar and transfer the excess beer from the jug and cap the bottle. Frugal

klickcue wrote:
Taking the exercise a step farther, how about left over beer that doesn't fit into a keg from the fermenter. Collect the extra beer in a jug for later use.

After seeing Rob's face after a kegging session, and he making us get a growler jug to collect the rest of our precious juice-- got the wheels turning a bit.

klickcue wrote:
Charge your bottle with corn sugar and transfer the excess beer from the jug and cap the bottle. Frugal

I am actually soaking off the labels of a batch of empty Duvel bottles (about 50 of them ) that someone gave me as we speak, so we'll be ready for our holiday brown we are kegging next week. I was tempted to get some carb tabs, but I think I'll shelf that idea for now. Oh the life of a frugel brewer... Next thing you know we'll be tipping the fermenter to get that last drop out...

You don't already save the last drop from the fermenter? You had me fooled

Actually, it was carb tabs/drops that got me thinking about the idea of loose priming sugar. I didn't find any published information about carb drop weight.

You are a lucky person to get the bottles. Sounds like a swell idea for your excess brown.

Adding the corn sugar to the empty bottles went fairly quickly and I don't have to worry about latent sugar in the bottom of the bottling bucket supercharging the last bottles.

Don't forget bottling yeast if a jug has been setting around for a while

Playing with the Black/Tan specific gravity separation for priming sugars.

Though most beers are not bottled, here is an example of the possible problems of priming sugar added to a bottling bucket. The sugar water was added first and the beer was racked on top of the sugar. Normal thought would lead a person to believe that the two concentrations would mix.

I contend that a person that is bottling would be better off dosing each bottle with sugar or a sugar/water concentration than bulk mixing sugar into the beer prior to bottling.

To take the step even farther, yeast solution has been added to carboys on top of wort (picture not taken). There is a distinct line of SG separation between the two mixtures. If left alone, the yeast and CO2 will finally mix. These two line of specific gravity would rather stay separated and are slow to mix.

The bottle on the left is a normal bottle. The bottle on the right is the bottom of the bottling bucket.

Cool stuff Chris.

What we should do is find an old "pill press", add the charge of sugar for the give FG and press it into a pill. Make your own drop charges.

Jason