Honey for priming - how much

[jollos]

Hey, I am bottling my next gingerbeer batch tomorrow and was considering trying a few out by priming with honey. Was going to do 8-10 grams per litre of sugar, but, no idea how much honey per litre to achieve as good carb.. has anyone had any experience with honey priming to be able to advise?

 

[captain crumpet]

Honey is 95% fermentable so weight for weight should be close enough to use the same as you would sucrose.

 

[MHB]

Honey is about 20% water and the solids are about 95% fermentable, so if we compared 1kg of honey to 1kg Sugar (sucrose) that is 100% fermentable.
1000g Honey = 800g solids at 95% fermentable = 760g of fermentables, or 76% fermentable (approximately), call it 75% if you want to make the calculations easier.
To get the same amount of fizz from honey as you get from sugar you need about 25% more than you would for sugar.
Your 8-10g becomes 10-12.5g of honey.

If you work out the density of honey you could use a syringe to get a fairly accurate dose into each bottle, warming the honey up makes it very easy to suck up into the syringe.
Mark

 

[jollos]

Thanks guys...after an attempt to backsweeten with whay ended up being a solid block of lactose I ended up bulk priming with sugar in this instance

 

[barls]

my brewing software tells me about 7.8g of honey per litre

 

[yochris77]

Is the honey flavour lost? And will raw honey cause infection so use pasteurised honey only?

 

[damoninja]

The amount of honey required is so low you'd never know it was there, it really is just an expensive and inconsistent way of priming

 

[jollos]

I assumed it would impart some flavour, but i might be wrong. As far as pasteurising..i personally would be heating in water anyway,to evenly distribute it, but honey has some amazing properties and never goes bad, so, even with my over cautious, almost paranoid nature, honey is probably the one source of contamination that i wouldn't be overly concerned about..i am however...a huge noob

 

[barls]

it has a flavour that disappears and reappears at about 3 months.
depending on the honey it can be really strong or very weak.
I've only done it twice and probably wouldn't do it again unless i was short on dextrose.