Corn Sugar Priming by Style

Brewing Processes
1

I’ve got three questions for the board’s consideration:

  1. How much nuance can one achieve in carbonation by making priming additions by weight instead of volume and if so…
  2. Does anyone know of a resource that has suggestions of those priming levels based on beer style or…
  3. If there is no resource, now might one calculate a corn sugar addition from suggested volumes of carbonation?
2

As I’m sure you know each beer style has it’s proper carbonation level.  I definitely suggest measuring the priming sugar by weight instead of volume.  It is more accurate.  “How to Brew” by John Palmer has a chart for the amount of priming sugar to use for a 5gal batch.  If you don’t have his book you can also find it at howtobrew.com  I’m sure there are plenty of other places online that you can find priming sugar calculators if you search around a bit.  Hope this helps.

Happy Brewing,
Brandon

3

  1. Just as much as force carbonation…except you can’t adjust it mid way through.

  2. Palmer and Zainashelff’s Brewing Classic Styles has a chart and instructions how to determine the right weight of sugar (for corn and cane) for any given volume/temperature combination, and then discusses the volumes of CO2 for each particular style.  Most styles are around 2.5 volumes with the exception of bitters (lower), and belgians (higher).

  3. the actual proper amount of carbonation is the amount that you think tastes the best for any particular style of your beer…if for competition, use the book above.

4

I use this one.
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

5

and here’s another one…

http://www.tastybrew.com/calculators/priming.html

6

I had an issue trying to find out how much to carbonate my last batch, and it ended up not being carbonated (after all that time waiting!). So I’m thinking it might have been my caps, first time I used caps, normally I do it in a Grolsch bottles. The Grolsch ones turned out ok, but the CO2 was still low. Could have been my $3 scale too that I used to measure the sugar with too. Anywho, does anybody know what the max amount of CO2 you can have in a bottle before it explodes? I think I got too concerned over measuring out exactly how much sugar. Just wondering how resilient glass bottles are haha