How to Pump Prime your bottled beer.

[Philbrew]

For more than six months I have been scouring the internet to find some reference to someone doing this beer prime method.  I have come up empty.  I can’t believe nobody has tried this simple, effective method.  If you know of any vaguely similar method, please add that knowledge to this discussion.

To pump prime your bottled beer you need this:

Figure 1.
A variation of bartender’s simple syrup.

And put it into this:

Figure 2.
A spray bottle with a 5 inch length of 1/8” rigid tube stuck in its nose.

The advantages are:

1. Do away with the bottling bucket.  You can bottle directly from the fermenter.
2. Very fast priming:  Put prime in a case of bottles in 50 seconds.
3. Versatility:  Prime different size bottles and different CO2 volumes with the same tool and prime solution.  See table 1.
   4.    Handy:  You keg most of your beer but have some beer left over for a few bottles.  Pump prime them.
4. Recarb bottles that are under carbed or lost carbonation.
5. Easy to add yeast to your prime solution when needed.
6. Customize your prime solution to meet your exact needs.

PUMP PRIME SIMPLE SYRUP
Bartenders have been making simple syrup for hundreds of years.  It’s just sugar boiled in water.  With good preparation sanitation it will keep in the fridge for months.

This method recipe uses an easy-to-remember formula:  1 gram table sugar in 2 milliliters  FINAL VOLUME of solution. 
For example, if you want 600 ml of prime syrup, boil about 700 ml of water.  Then pour off and reserve about half.  To the remaining 350 ml of water add 300 grams of table sugar and boil.  Cool and pour into your sanitized, measured container and top up to 600 ml. from the reserved boiled water.  600 ml. of syrup will prime a hundred thirty 12 oz. bottles to 2.5 volumes of CO2.

Keep your prime syrup in the fridge.  On bottling day warm it up a bit by setting the container in a bowl of warm tap water for 20 minutes or so.  It will then pump correctly.

Edit:  Or don’t keep it in the fridge, keep it on the shelf.  Can a bunch of 12 oz. jelly jars with about 11 oz. in each.  Pop one open on bottling day.  11 oz. is enough for about 70 bottles.

PUMP PRIME TOOL
I bought the 750 ml spray bottle at LHBS for $3.50 and measured its output per pump many dozens of times.  If you fully pull the trigger (and that’s easy and quick), it puts out exactly 1.5 ml per pump.  The tube is a piece of hobby size metal that you can get at any hobby or craft store.  My small town only has an Ace Hardware but they carry a small selection of hobby metals.  I bought the 1/8” copper tube for $1.29 for a 12” piece (aluminum or brass would also have worked).

Unscrew the nozzle and carefully pry out the nozzle head insert (the part with the o-ring).  It’s a snap-in fit so it can be stubborn.  Discard the center bit and reinstall the nozzle head insert.  Drill the nozzle with a 1/8” drill bit and insert a 5” piece of 1/8” tube into the nozzle.

Figure 3.

Table 1.
CO2 volumes using the Northern Brewer priming sugar calculator.
(*beer at 71 F)

Edit:  To use this chart, make sure your spray bottle puts out 1.5 ml per pump.  Many do not but with some simple calculating you can create your own chart corresponding to your pump output.

Edit:  Also, check your sprayer pump output every 4-5 batches.

Pump priming is fast.  With a case of bottles ready for prime as in Figure 2, you can put 3 pumps per bottle in 24 bottles in 50 seconds.  Four pumps per bottle takes 62 seconds.

So far, I have pump primed 328 bottles of beer.  All carbed successfully and uniformly.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that many home brewers have given up on bottling beer and gone to kegs because bottling can take a whole afternoon or evening and that makes it a hassle.  I have a couple of kegs and they have their advantages but I like to have bottled beer too.  I brew 6 gal. batches.  So, when I keg, there’s also 10-12 bottles that need to be primed.  And when I bottle the full batch, I can go from cases of empties on the shelf to 60 bottles of beer on the shelf in 1 hour and 32 minutes!  Pump prime is one part of that efficiency.  There are other tools that I use that also help to take the time and hassle out of bottling.

[kramerog]

This is pretty ingenious.  I use sugar cubes to carbonate the extra beer that doesn’t fit in a keg.  The few times I tried it, it worked well but desired carbonation has to match the amount of sugar and the sugar cube preferably fits down the neck of the bottle.

[reverseapachemaster]

I don’t know how you are shaving off hours by not cleaning a bottling bucket at the beginning and end of brewing and not siphoning into a bucket before bottling. I suppose it adds a lot of time to do all that work to bottle a gallon or so of beer if the rest is going in kegs but it is not a significant amount of time in a full bottling run.

I’m also not sure I would trust a simple syrup sitting in the fridge for months to be free from microorganisms. It might be fine for making drinks that are immediately consumed but for beer sitting for weeks or months there may be yeasts and bacteria coming along for the ride.

I can see how this system makes a lot of sense where you are bottling a small number of bottles at the end of filling kegs but not sure the risk of infection from the syrup bottle outweighs the time of using a bucket for a full bottling run.

[Philbrew]

@reverseapachemaster

I don’t know how you are shaving off hours by not cleaning a bottling bucket at the beginning and end of brewing and not siphoning into a bucket before bottling.

As I said at the end of the post: “Pump prime is one part of that efficiency.  There are other tools that I use that also help to take the time and hassle out of bottling.”  I should put together a post detailing my whole bottling process.

"I’m also not sure I would trust a simple syrup sitting in the fridge for months to be free from microorganisms. It might be fine for making drinks that are immediately consumed but for beer sitting for weeks or months there may be yeasts and bacteria coming along for the ride. "

Would you trust sugar cubes sitting on a shelf for months?  Or Prime Drops or other priming “pills” that were made by unknown processes?  If you are worried about infection in the simple syrup for long term storage, go with an old bartenders trick, add a shot of vodka.  Or throw it out after a couple of weeks.  It’s cheap and easy to make.

[Philbrew]

reverseapachemaster,
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be flip or snarky in my answer to your post.  Concern about sanitation and bacteria is always a good brewer trait.  I was just trying to offer some solutions to your concern.
And I’ve thought of another solution to the long term storage of priming syrup concern that I may do myself.
If you have a pressure cooker, try canning a bunch of 10-12 oz. jelly jars of prime syrup.

• Should keep almost indefinitely.
• Just enough for a 5-6 gal. batch, with a little extra.
• Don’t need to refrigerate.
• Make a year’s supply (or two) at one time.

[beersk]

Nice idea. I use honey to prime bottles and measure it by weighing it as I add the honey to the bottle if I have left over beer or want to bottle some off the fermenter. Easy for me to do since I ferment in kegs. And I agree, I like having beer in bottles as well as kegs.