I am preparing to bottle my first sour beer, (for obvious reasons, I don’t want to use a keg) and had a question: What is the proper amount of priming sugar to add to the beer for carbonation? Is it the same as non-sour beers? I figured that the bugs in there might keep chewing through the sugars, and cause the bottles to over-carbonate? The beer itself has been aging for almost a year now…
After a year, the sugars the yeast and bacteria can consume should have been consumed unless you did a fancy extra-dextrinous wort or something like it or somehow managed to put the critters to sleep with cold temperature or excessive foul language.
Post your recipe and process for the best answer.
Agree with Kinetic on all counts.
I prime to 3 vol. and add wine yeast. My sours go through the seasons in part of my house that gets fairly warm in the middle of the summer (it can get close to 80F) so I know the long aging period plus the rise in temperature means very little CO2 remains dissolved in the beer. I think I am actually getting somewhere in the mid to upper 2 vol.
any favorite wine yeasts for bottle conditioning sours? I’m going to be bottling some sours this weekend or next week myself.
I really like Lalvin EC-1118 Dry Champagne yeast. It is cheap ($1 per 5 gram pack), alcohol tolerant, and can withstand a low pH environment. All perfect for sour beer conditioning.