I need to bottle my oatmeal stout tomorrow, and (partly due to a complete loss of time at this point in my year) I’m going to put most of what is about a 2.5 gallon batch in a Tap-a-Draft bottle. There will be a little left over and I’d like to bottle it for testing during the aging process (important research, don’t you know). I don’t have any carbonation drops, so was wondering if anyone had a sensible and safe rule of thumb for cane or corn sugar by measurement per 12-oz bottle. Since it’s stout, low carbonation is not only safe but within style.
Fill the tap-a-draft, put what is left in a bottling bucket. Measure beer, add 1oz/gallon and bottle.
Take the amount of sugar you are using say 2oz convert to grams 56ish. Take your beer 2.5 gallons convert it to ounces 320. 56 grams of sugar into 320 ounces of beer = .175 grams per ounce of beer. Now you can multiply that by whatever size bottle you want-12oz- to get 2.1 grams of sugar for a 12 oz bottle. Works with whatever carb level you want to use, and different size bottles too.
Thanks on both counts.
Do you want to add the sugar straight to the bottle?
I’ve primed individual bottles before. I just used plain table sugar, didn’t boil or anything. That was just to carb a couple bottles to check that I had the flavor balance right before I bottled the whole batch. I used the recipator carbonation calculator, I just set the bottle size to 0.5L (they were euro bottles).
Thanks nateo and euge – this was what I was looking for. (Though I ended up washing bottles and negotiating with my other half about a weeknight bottling session, so I’ll keep this in mind for the future. I find the real pain in the behind about bottling is not the actual bottling itself, it’s the prep and cleanup.)