I brewed a 5 gallon batch of beer but I split the batch 3 ways (two 1 gallon carboys and one 3 gallon carboy) to try dry hopping with different hops. I am getting ready to bottle my beer and i came across coopers carbonation drops. I am temped to try them out of easy, but I wanted some input as to the results. I was wondering if anyone has tried them before and and how their beer turned out or am I better off using corn sugar (I think it will be hard splitting 3/4ths of a cup of corn sugar into the volumes i mentioned above).
i use Muntons CarbTabs, pills, they work good. i keg all my beer and often have a few bottles extra after kegging, its easy to drop in a few pills rather than figure how much corn sugar you need. 4 pills per bottle is what i use, with good results. add the pills to the bottles before filling.
I tried the Coopers on my very first attempt at homebrewing and my beer failed to carbonate, but I seriously doubt it was the fault of the drops. They did completely dissolve and I suspect the yeast was at fault. Either I killed it by not rinsing my sanitizer well, or something. I’m afraid to try them again, but they make pretty good hard candy…
+1 I’m with midtex, as they make good candy to hand out at Halloween, but not so much for carbonating beer. :-\
I’ve had good results using them. If anything I’ve had slight problems with over-carbonation a couple of times. One drop is supposed to carbonate a 375ml bottle of beer. I think that is a slightly different volume than 12 oz., which might be the problem.
I got some once and had difficulty getting them to fit
into the mouth of the bottle…they were too large.
Otherwise they did do the job.
I had some beer a friend used the tabs to carb and
it was unappatizing to have white floaties in your beer
so that is an issue when you use those. That
was a known issue with a batch that was circulating
for a while. Not sure if they are all gone by now or not.
I had my best results using the bottling bucket
with dissolved sterile sweetened water stirred in FWIW.
My experience with the Coopers drops is similar to Summy’s.
I’d say about a third of the time, the bottles were over carbed.