I’m chilling a stout now to clear the brew and plan to bottle Sunday afternoon. My son will be arriving from out-of-state Wed. evening and leaving on Sunday May 27th, and I’d like to get a few bottles carbonated within 5 or 6 days of bottling.
The priming sugar will be going in to cold beer. Normally, I would just put the bottled beer in my utility room where it would get a bit of additional warmth from the water heater and let the carbonation proceed at its own pace.
Would it do any harm to take a few of the bottles and put them in a sink full of hot water to raise the temperature quickly or would that stress the yeast?
So normally for a beer of this gravity, unless you were trying to condition the beers with active yeast, you wouldn’t add additional yeast at bottling time, but because you’d like to try and get some bottles carbed in a short time frame, it may be a good idea. In fact it may be the only idea.
So:
Let’s assume you have 5 gallons of beer to package. We will use 1 M cells/ml as our bottling rate and also assume that the dry yeast in question has 20 B cells/g. First thing you want to do is convert the packaged volume to ml:
5 * 3.785 * 1000 = 18,925 ml
Then you want to find out how many grams of dry yeast to add to your sugar slurry. Since we now have the volume in ml and we already know the dosing rate and cells/g, we can calculate the amount in grams of dry yeast:
( ( V (ml) / Cell Density (B cells/g) ) * 0.001 ) * Dose Rate (M cells/ml)
( ( 18,925 / 20 ) *0.001 ) * 1 = 0.946 g or ~ 1 g of dry yeast
If you could put the bottles under a cardboard box with an old incandescent light bulb for several days (just leave the light on the whole time), with the intent of keeping the temperature to about 90-95 F, the bottles should carbonate fast with whatever yeast you have in there – no need to use any special yeast. You’d want to monitor the temperature to ensure it doesn’t get upward to 110 F or so, which could kill the yeast. If it got that hot, punch holes in the box to let some heat out and continue to monitor.
This should work really well, if you can figure out the best way to make it work.
I may try D.M. Taylor’s idea, but in the meantime I tried Big Monk’s formula for US 05 using the 6B cells/g from another website. My calculations come out to almost 3 grams of dry yeast which seems like a lot.
Comments please and thanks to all for your advice.
The only reason I’d be wary of Dave’s idea is the elevated temperature. Whatever works for you.
6 B cells/g is pretty low. Shoot the middle and do 14 B cells/g if it makes you feel better. And drop down the dose rate lower than 1 M cells/ml. I suggested the higher rate due to the time constraints.
Well, that’s a whole other debate. There are some cell counts out there by Terrill that show dry yeast densities at upwards of 20 B/g, although I have some personal correspondance from R&D people at Lallemand and Fermentis that shows a more reasonable 8-10 B/g.
You have to take with a grain of salt the densities listed on the packaging, as they state that they guarantee >= X amount of viable cells at end of life.
The reason I say split the difference is it falls on the conservative side between 10 and 20 B/g. Only way to know for sure is to count.
I’ve been bottling every batch since 1998. I can very confidently say that you definitely do NOT need to add any more yeast. If you do, you’ll just have a ton of sludge on the bottom of every bottle, but no advantage from adding it.
I thought of one other concern with my above recommendation of cardboard & light bulb — be sure to shield the bottles from the light to avoid skunking. This can be done very simply by covering the bottles with a cloth so they aren’t hit by direct light.
For many, there is not a specific reason to add bottling yeast. However, I think there are specific reasons to want to add bottling yeast and it seems you don’t have reason to.
I like the consistency and the control it gives me. I also want to bottle with active yeast to scavenge oxygen. In this case, the OP wants to speed up the process to hit a deadline.
It’s all in how you look at it. I get very slight sediment from the amount of bottling yeast we are talking about so I can’t see there be any issues with tons of sludge. In fact, it’s on par with what you see in a bottle of Ommegang or your favorite Trappist ale. They are bottling in the 1-3 M/ml range and I wouldn’t call what i see there “sludge” by any stretch of the imagination.
