Best Priming Sugar/ingredient

[Ross]

Stuster
I get my priming drum, which is usually a 2nd fermenter.
I have ziplock bags with pre-measured amounts of sugar in them in the brewery (bathroom). They used to be 160gms and 180gms but I seem to go for the 160s more now, maybe because my brews are getting maltier.
I empty the bag into the drum, followed by a good splash of boiled water out of the kettle. Maybe 200mls.
I swish the fermenter around so the water runs around like swishing a red wine glass before you take a sniff. I continue until all crystals are dissolved.
Then i take my brew from the CCing fridge, and put it up high on a tall bench so there's a lot of potential energy waiting to drop the beer. *Note - No sediment (and flow) reducing tap is fitted to the CCing drum.
Now I lean my bulkpriming drum with the sugar solution in it on a 45degree angle with the tap facing up. *Note - Your tap will be full of sugar syrup so leaning the fermenter will now empty it. I think failing to do this resulted in my 1st bottle having about 5 times the sugar required. A sediment reducing tap will also be more of a pain to empty at this point.
I start dropping the beer until the tap is covered, altough still up at a 45deg angle, there's a good amount of beer and sugar mixed now. Then I rest it back to a stable upright position. The height and a normal tap results in a quick and turbulent racking but silent with no splashing. I'm fairly confident that everything has been mixed well.
When complete with about a pint of crap left in the bottom of my CCing drum, i get ready to bottle, but allowing for slight paranoia, i use a sanitised mash paddle and stir from bottom to top a few times as well.

Using almost only 750ml and 1L champers bottles and this method, I've found bottling to be much less of a chore.
I believe these improvements marked with an * have led to consistency in bulk priming.

[post="85656"][/post]​

Jeez, & that's easier than priming with the measure :blink:

Takes me all of a couple of mins to prime each bottle with the measure - no secondary fermenters or spoons to clean, no oxidisation worries, no consistancy worries - This bulk priming has me beat unless you want to vary away from the measure amount, which I can't say I've ever had a problem with - each to there own hey I know I'm in the minority on this one....

 

[Trough Lolly]

Before the kegs came along, I normally bulk primed a 23L batch with 180g of dextrose in 300ml of boiled water. White sugar was a backup for when I ran out of dextrose...

I used dextrose because it's highly fermentable and leaves very little of itself behind in the brew - it may up the alcohol levels and thus lower the final gravity of the beer but I'd rather do that than apply a post boil addition of malt, which is what you do if you prime with DME or LME. I like the idea of trying different priming ingredients and doing a side by side comparison...Do whatever pleases your palate!

Never used a hard to ferment adjunct like corn syrup (aka maltodextrin) as a primer - it's best used by extract brewers who want to up the body of the beer, and don't want to muck around with its grain equivalent - Carapils...

Cheers,
TL

 

[Trough Lolly]

Jeez, & that's easier than priming with the measure :blink:

Takes me all of a couple of mins to prime each bottle with the measure - no secondary fermenters or spoons to clean, no oxidisation worries, no consistancy worries - This bulk priming has me beat unless you want to vary away from the measure amount, which I can't say I've ever had a problem with - each to there own hey I know I'm in the minority on this one....

[post="85723"][/post]​

G'day Ross,
I know this is drifting slightly O/T, but I need to reply to your comments here...Yep, I agree that this is a fairly detailed and labour intensive variant on how to bulk prime, but I like to bulk prime since I can then confidently bottle my beer in any sized vessel.

I have two darwin stubbies, a bunch of 330ml green stubs, some 375ml stubs, a dozen grolsch swingtops and some 780ml king browns that I bottle with. Now maths was never my strongpoint, so working out how much primer to add to each container is a load of feck!

So I toss 180g into a pyrex bowl with 300ml of water, nuke it till it boils, leave it in the freezer (covered) for 20mins afterwards and I have a primer that goes into the racking bin. I can bottle any vessel afterwards knowing I have a well primed beer. As I mentioned earlier, I keg now, but for the last 3 or more years, I bulk primed every brew and I've never had a bottle bomb or flattie!

I must admit though, that when I fill the keg and have enough left over for a six pack, I use a spoonfull of dextrose to prime the six stubbies! h34r:

Cheers,
TL

Edit: spelling.

 

[johnno]

I just boil some water and stir in the dextrose in a pyrex jar.
Then i bulk prime.
The only thing I make sure I do is give it a good stir so the mixture spreads out evenly.
Never had an infection like this.
By this stage there should be enough alcohol to keep the bugs away for the short while it takes to do this.

johnno

 

[mudsta]

All i do is put my sucrose or dextrose in a plastic jug, pour 500ml boiling water over it and stir.

Tip that into an empty sterized fermenter. Rack my brew into it via hose at slow-med speed to help mix. Maybe give 1 or 2 slow stir with a spoon then bottle.

Bulk priming is the way to go. You cant double prime random bottles, you dont
get sugar reside around the bottle top (wont cap properly) and you can bottle all diferent size bottles out of the same batch without having to adjust sugar amounts.

mudsta :beerbang:

 

[bindi]

I just boil some water and stir in the dextrose in a pyrex jar.
Then i bulk prime.
The only thing I make sure I do is give it a good stir so the mixture spreads out evenly.
Never had an infection like this.
By this stage there should be enough alcohol to keep the bugs away for the short while it takes to do this.

johnno

[post="85734"][/post]​

This what I do except I pour the priming sugar[usually dex now] into a 2nd fermenter [cube] transfer the beer onto it and GENTLY give it a swish around, then bottle,and bottles I have a large range of, so bulk priming makes it easy.
Oh and I am usually drinking while bottling so I don't want to think about it. :chug:

 

[Murray]

I bulk primed with wort I saved from the boil a couple of times. Bit of scribbling to work out the target volumes from the wort gravity. Worked well, but certainly not worth the effort.

 

[tangent]

Ross, it sounds complex but it has really speeded up my bottling.
And what TL said about different sized bottles.

 

[cubbie]

I used dextrose because it's highly fermentable and leaves very little of itself behind in the brew - it may up the alcohol levels and thus lower the final gravity of the beer but I'd rather do that than apply a post boil addition of malt, which is what you do if you prime with DME or LME.

[post="85728"][/post]​

I just add about 300ml of boiling water to my DME, no further boiling.

I also as others have mentioned just rack onto the primer, never stir afterwoods.

 

[tangent]

stirring is bad?

 

[Linz]

don't be in so much of a hurry ta fill the bottles to get that carboy refilled..... occ

[post="85705"][/post]​

Aint that what its all about???? :chug: :beer: :beerbang:

 

[Trough Lolly]

stirring is bad?

[post="85842"][/post]​

If you're referring to stirring the beer when you bulk prime, then yes, you should avoid stirring the brew to mix the priming fluid through it - you run the risk (although it's a pretty small risk, admittedly) that you will add air to the beer and potentially introduce cardboard like flavours to the beer. In reality, I've accidentally stirred up a beer when rousing it in primary and I haven't noticed outrageously high levels of oxidisation occurring, but anyway, it should be avoided.

And the easiest way to avoid this is to try the following technique for bulk priming:

- Pour in the cooled priming fluid to the bottling vessel,
- Fit a hose on the source fermenter and place the other end in a coil, in the bottom of the bottling vessel, (I'm assuming you gravity drop the beer from the fermenting source vessel to the bottling destination vessel).
- Carefully fill the hose with beer, place the outflow end in the bottom of the racking vessel and then let her rip so you rack to the bottling vessel with minimal bubbles and full flow of the beer out of the fermenting vessel (air is bad at this stage, as mentioned above so you want the hose to be full of beer with minimal bubbles or air in the transfer line - just like a keg beer line!!).
- Stare at the whirlpool created by the coiled racking hose and do a merry jig because physics is doing the work for you!!

The whirlpool effect the coiled racking tube creates will greatly assist in mixing the primer into the beer, without having to stir - I've never stirred my beer when I bulk prime and I've never had any bottle bombs or dud bottles. If you want to get real techo, get thee to Bunnings and buy a Pope in-line irrigation filter and put it in the transfer line to catch and filter out any hop residue before it gets to the bottling vessel...

Cheers,
TL

 

[tangent]

I must point out, that my stirring style is more like an elderly gent doing sidestroke than a frenzied butterfly dash at the olympics. No bubbles or splashing but rather gently moving some beer from the bottom to the top. But I will bear that in mind.

 

[Murray]

Nothing wrong with stirring as long as it is gentle. It is certainly better than a higher risk of the priming solution not being uniformly mixed.

 

[Murray]

Ooh, double post! Here is a letter to Brewing Techniques that may be of interest.

Priming Methods Compared
Shortly after starting to home brew (and after reading about Reinheitsgebot, the German Beer Purity Law of 1516), I began to get philosophical about my beer and pondered whether to prime with corn sugar (dextrose) or with dried malt extract (DME). I'd like to share my observations about the pros and cons of priming with DME and dextrose.
Because DME has only about 60-80% of the fermentables of dextrose by weight (not volume), duplicating the carbonation level of a recipe in which you used dextrose, requires that you weigh out the dextrose you used for that recipe, add 25-55%, and use that weight of DME.

Many who use DME for priming do so for the same reason that I switched to using it instead of dextrose - we felt that it is important to keep the beer all-malt. I've heard some brewers say that DME gives finer carbonation (smaller bubbles) than corn sugar, but I have not verified this phenomenon.

Dextrose is easier to use and store once the package has been opened. I have found that when the humidity is higher than about 35%, open packages of DME quickly harden and eventually turn into something resembling brown glass. I have yet to see dextrose harden; it may clump a bit, but never harden to unusability.

Both DME and dextrose must be sanitized before use. DME foams up much more than dextrose when boiled in the priming solution. DME seems to take a bit longer to carbonate than does dextrose. Some home brewers are concerned that using dextrose for priming will give their beers cidery flavors, but the small amount of dextrose used for priming will not perceptably alter the beer's flavor.

When I switched to DME for priming, I encountered what I thought was an infection. After a few weeks in the bottle, a thin, oil-like layer would form right at the level of the beer in the neck of the bottle. I assumed it was some kind of aerobic microbiota like sherry flor yeast or Acetobacter. I have confirmed with further experimentation that it was actually protein from my DME priming solution. When I switched back to dextrose for priming, the problem went away. Therefore, if you want to use DME for priming, I suggest force-chilling the priming solution so that the protein (cold break) forms and settles. This cold trub can be left behind to avoid adding it to the beer. This process points up one more advantage of using dextrose for priming: dextrose has no protein and therefore no hot or cold break.

As you can see, from my perspective dextrose seems to be more favorable for priming than DME.


-Al Korzonas
Countryside, Illinois

 

[RobW]

Ooh, double post! Here is a letter to Brewing Techniques that may be of interest.

When I switched to DME for priming, I encountered what I thought was an infection. After a few weeks in the bottle, a thin, oil-like layer would form right at the level of the beer in the neck of the bottle. I assumed it was some kind of aerobic microbiota like sherry flor yeast or Acetobacter. I have confirmed with further experimentation that it was actually protein from my DME priming solution. When I switched back to dextrose for priming, the problem went away. Therefore, if you want to use DME for priming, I suggest force-chilling the priming solution so that the protein (cold break) forms and settles.

I've definitely seen high tide marks in bottles primed with DME. Didn't seem to affect the taste at all & pretty much disappeared when the beer was poured.