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Using Dry Ice to Carbonate?
One of the guys who helps me brew came up with an interesting idea the other day. Why not use small dry ice pellets to carbonate bottled beer? Obviously the amount would have to be measured very carefully, but it seems as if you could get rid of the sediment left by natural carbonation...
Interested to hear thoughts from others on this.
Hmmm....found one answer to my question:
http://www.bodensatz.com/staticpages/in … edures-FAQ
Has anyone experimented with using dry ice to pressurize bottles without any sediment?
Now there's something I've never heard of before. However, a guy in a former brew club we were in was a chemistry professor at the University who does a lot of similar stuff with dry ice, so I put the question to him.
He puts on shows for local highschools where he puts a small piece of dry ice into a plastic soda bottle with a bit of water, then caps it. The thing explodes quite impressively.
Moral: dry ice can be extremely dangerous and we strongly discourage you from trying to do this!
Reply From the Chem Prof Scott
If I understood your question clearly, you should use 0.58 cm^3 or 0.92g of dry ice to produce 500mL of nonpressurized CO2. Careful, a mistake and you've made yourself a bomb!...but let me come and watch :-)
our comment to that
Since according to Mark Hibbert "green beer" already contains about 0.90 volumes of CO2 at 20C (please check his tables for other temperatures, as it varies dramatically), then we'd obviously need about 1 to 1.5 grams of dry ice to carbonate 500ml of beer.
However - and here's the cincher - under normal conditions carbonation forms very slowly in beer over a period of a week or more. Because it happens so slowly, the beer is able to absorb the carbonation which is produced. If you tried the trick with dry ice - even if you did put in the proper amount - it would release the entire amount of carbonation in only a few seconds. This would almost definitely cause a very violent explosion, so please do not try this!
Although I'd be risking life and limb, I still have this strange desire to try this...
Hmmm...the more I research this, the more I have to emphasize to anyone reading this who may think it sounds like a good idea - DON'T DO IT. You can very easily create an extremely dangerous bomb. People who try to force carbonation in 2 liter plastic bottles are often getting injured because they used too much dry ice - it would be very easy to use too much in a small beer bottle.
OK, my word of warning is done. 
I too at one time was searching for a way to sediment free bottling. As it turns out it seems the only way to safely do this is to force carbonate with the proper pressure from some type of vessel to a bottle. This of course costs more $$$$$. I would just as well use the old priming sugar measurement I know works and take my sediment like a man. It doesn't hurt you and if you pour slowly into a glass/cup/mug , little to none gets out. I have seen dry ice plastic soda bottle bombs and I would hate to see a glass one--that could be very dangerous!!! Just my 2 cents worth.
I personally don't mind the sediment, but I've been giving a lot of bottles away to friends who usually forget to leave a little at the bottom (or they just drink straight from the bottle)...
Sounds like using dry ice to carbonate beer is a BAD idea. But, what about using a tiny piece in a bottle (with a tiny bit of sanitized water in it) and let it "dissolve" before bottling. This could be useful when bottling kegged beer. The bottle would chill so there would be less foaming and the CO2 inside the bottle would prevent oxidation.
wow, you could send someone you don't like a growler of homebrew carbonated with dry ice......KABLOOOYYY !!!!!.
DC
Not bragging, but I'm an old hand at this. I've charged up over 10,000 bottles in my lifetime. I've been doing it ever since PET bottles hit the market. I've given seltzer water to my relatives for Christmas, generally over 200 bottles each year for more than a decade. I never buy seltzer water anymore. Dry IceŽ pellets are cheap, clean and readily available. PET bottles (polyethylene teraphthalate) will be washed, dried and hand delivered to you on a silver platter by your friends and relatives if they know U R making them gifts of mineral water in return. When you give someone 4 or 5 bottles of the stuff, they appreciate it as much as if you'd gone out and bought them a $10 gift.
Although I should have, I have never weighed pellets. I always eyeball it. I had lots of fun learning. I used to love blowing up bottles with water & co2 pellets. You have to exercise common sense. You know in advance that the bottle is gonna blow up. So you take the necessary precautions beforehand. It's not like you're playing with dynamite or black powder, but a sufficient amount of energy and force is released in a bottle explosion to hurt you. I suggest you go dumpster diving, get yourself a couple hundred bottles 'n caps, a couple of scoops of co2 pellets and a water hose. Then start practicing. Go buy a few off-the-shelf soft drink products. Don't open them. Squeeze them to gain a 'feel' and some appreciation of just how hard the bottles can be pumped up. Take note of the amount of water and the amount of co2 used each time. After blowing a bottle, do another of the same size, same amount of liquid and a little less co2. You'll find the magic amount of pellets to add soon enough.
The bottles you buy regularly contain about 55PSI on the shelf. This drops to around 40PSI upon chilling the drink with refrigeration. I bought a bicycle pump with a built-in pressure guage. I've pumped them up to 120PSI hundreds of times. I'm not certain, but I believe 2-liter bottles pop at about 180 to 200PSI.
I've recarb'd flat soft drinks and flat beer with the same method. Always had success. I can tell by the 'feel' of the bottle whether I've got enough in there or not. If the bottle's too soft - I reopen it and add a tiny bit more. If you're really bent on knowing the pressure inside, you can get a valve cap that allows you to check the pressure. I got a Fizz Giz 'cuz it was only two bucks. Now I can measure the pressure with a guage and an inflation needle. But there are other valve caps out there that allow you to use the same pressure guage you use on your car tires.
If you DO have a rather good understanding of chemistry I think you may be able to pull this off (although you should always be wary of the danger no matter who you are). I'm not exactly sure how someone could have given you an amount of dry ice to use without greater knowledge of your specific brew, (i.e. a general formula for the brew, since its not entirely a uniform compound).
To do this properly you would need to come up with a Henry's law constant for CO2 solubility in your beer (it should be pretty close to what it would be in water since it IS mostly water), decide what pressure in atmospheres the partial pressure of CO2 should be once the beer is carbonated (which i think may be the same for any beer carbonized in a 12 ounce glass bottle), and based on that info you can calculate a number of moles of CO2 to use in each bottle.
You would need a very accurate scale, but with the cost effectiveness of dry ice it may be a pretty cheap way to pull off forced carbonation. Also, since CO2 solubility in water increases with decreasing temperature, maybe you could allow this reaction to take place say between 30-40 degrees Fahrenheit which would slow the CO2 sublimation rate somewhat, although i'm not exactly sure by what factor, it would be proportion to the amount of CO2 present. Hopefully it would slow the sublimation enough to where it wouldn't explode the bottle, allowing the correct amount of CO2 to dissolve in the liquid. Still risky but maybe plausible.
If I try it i'll either post my results or the bloody pictures of me pulling glass out of my body. Cheers all!
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