Priming the Beer for Bubbles
The first bottling step is making sure the bottles are cleaned and sanitized. Follow the instructions in Chapter 10 to ensure that you have safe and ready bottles. Make sure to take apart any bottle wands and bucket spigots and clean and sanitize them completely. This is your last point of contact with the beer before drinking, so don't falter now!
During fermentation, lots of bubbles clinked harmlessly to the void. For the bottle, you provide the yeast with extra food and trap the bubbles. Guides often say add a ¾ cup of sugar, but it's better to weigh your sugar. All priming materials are presented in ounces by weight.
Priming Options
Sugar — The default choice for most brewers. Corn sugar (dextrose) syrup dissolves easily, providing ample fodder for tired yeast. Look at Chapter 7 for different sugar additions.
Dry malt extract — Some brewers believe using DME instead of sugar produces better head and finer carbonation. It may leave a ring around the bottleneck, a possible sign of contamination, and it may take longer to carbonate.
Honey — Brewers attempting to spruce up a beer's aroma can turn to honey. Unlike earlier doses of honey, adding to the bottle retains more honey aroma.
Wort — Breweries that bottle-condition their beer often use unfermented wort to prime the beer. The amount of wort needed is determined by the specific gravity of the wort. You want to add the same amount of gravity from the wort as you do sugar. Germans add actively fermenting wort to the bottle (krausening). In theory, the active beer carbonates faster and clears more postfermentation flaws.
Carbonation tablets — Hard sugar tablet “drops” designed to dissolve in the bottle. Dosage varies by manufacturer, but all go straight in the bottle, which is then capped and shaken. They take longer due to the time it takes to dissolve. Great for a few bottles when kegging.
Brewers talk about carbonation in terms of volumes of CO2. What it means is for a given volume of beer, there are X volumes of CO2 in solution. For instance, one gallon of beer carbonated to 2.5 volumes has 2.5 gallons of dissolved CO2.
