Double Brewing

[alboot]

My son in law wants me to what he calls double brew a batch of home brew. He says that if the brew is ready to bottle you can add another kilo of sugar to make the alcohol level higher. Can this be done? Does it need more yeast? What about temperature?
Any replies welcome especially if it is a possibility.

 

[manticle]

If the brew has finished fermenting and is ready for bottling, adding more sugar (fermentable) then bottling immediately will mean your bottles will quite likely be amazingly fizzy and blow up.

Sugar ferments into alcohol. It creates carbon dioxide and pressure as it does so. Bottles leave no room for escape. That's why we ferment, then add a tiny bit of sugar before we bottle (to make our beer a bit fizzy from carbon dioxide production).

If you want to make a high alcohol beer, it is possible and it will involve the addition of more fermentables (whether sugar or malt or syrup or whatever else). Some super lovely beers are high ABV. However if you want to make a good beer that's high in alcohol there's a few tricks and tips to stop it tasting like snail poison.

Simply adding a kg of sugar at bottling point is just asking for trouble. Nasty glass breaking, eye gouging, trouble.

Any bottles that survived would most likely be super fizzy and taste nasty but that's the least of your worries. I'd be surprised if an extra kilo at bottling time allowed any to survive.

It would bring new meaning to the term 'glass eye'.

 

[HoppingMad]

Never heard of this being done before myself. (adding the sugar at bottling stage).

Manticle is right, if you do this you are essentially going to overprime your bottles with sugar and wind up with bottle bombs so I'd advise against adding the sugar at this point too. If you're looking to boost alcohol it needs to be added when you put everything in the fermenter first up.

In my uni student brewing days if we wanted a high alcohol brew we used to just tip more sugar in at the start - in otherwords - one tin of kit beer, and where it called for 1 kilo of sugar, we'd add two. You would wind up with a beer that didn't really taste like beer anymore - more like a really strong beer hooch where the main flavour was alcohol.

If that's what he's after that's what you'd have to do. Won't be the world's greatest tasting drink (take it from one who's done it) but will take you to happy places I guess! :icon_drunk:

Hopper.

 

[muckey]

adding more fermentable gets the yeast kicked into their life cycle again.

temperature control etc is the same for any fermentation process.

DONT bottle after adding 1 kg of sugar otherwise you'll have the explosions described before.

it's worth noting at this point that yeast like certain things - eg they love sugars and convert them to ethanol but it's not a single stage process so you'll get more alcohol taste as well as more other flavours you dont want

just like temperature, yeasties are sensitive to CO2 levels and alcohol levels, they dont just go on and on if you keep pouring more sugar in

in the end half a glas will knock you off your feet but it wont taste like beer.

personally I dont think its worth the grief