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What priming sugar to use when bottling beer?
Hi Good Brewing Folk!! This is my first post. I hope you guys can help me. I'm making a brew and I intend to bottle it. What sugars can I use for priming in the bottle? Which is best? Can I use a dark / molasses style sugar to add some depth of flavour? How's fructose? Thanks. 
you can use pretty much any sugar you want as long as you are aware the results on the taste and how much to use to get the right amount of carbonation (and prevent beer bombs!)
The most commonly used are dextrose (corn sugar, DME, and honey. Corn sugar is by far the most common, it provides quick, good carbonation without affecting flavor or body.
By all means, experiment.. that's half the fun! Just know what impact the sugar you choose will have. It would suck to add an off taste to a great beer after you had gone through all the work of making it.
Here is a brewing carbonation calculator that may help. It has inputs for different sugars and the like. I usually go for the middle of the style recommendations until I see how it works and then adjust on my next batch. Like the first beer listed is American Amber Ale and has a recommendation of 2.2 - 2.8 volumes of CO2 I would use 2.5 on the first try.
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/brew/widgets/bp.html
Hope this helps.
GOODBREWING
This is a topic I would like to know more about, Using DME or corn sugar is easy, follow the directions. However, I would like to learn about using other types of sugar, ie., honey, maple syrup, fruit extract / juice.
I was just reading about Kraeusening, This facinates me, carbonation using wort. If I brew a little on the heavy side, and save a couple quarts of wort (gyle). I just add that at bottling time. There is a formula. This is based on 3/4 cup corn sugar per 5 gallons. I have taken this directly from "The Joy of Homebrewing"
(12 X gallons of wort)
Quarts of gyle= -----------------------------
[(specific gravity-1) X 1000]
I hope I don't get in trouble for copywrite stuff.
I have never tried this, but I will on my next brew. Using the same wort from start to finish for each beer made.
Howdy from new member zimny piwo, I have just completed my first 2 batches ever of home brew over the last 2 months. 1st. is a lager fermented with maple brown sugar and the 2nd. an I.P.A. both were bottled with a "priming sugar" I purchased at my local home brewing supplier. ( to me it looked just like a smaller bag of the corn "fermenting" sugar. I bottled into 16 oz. returnable bottles I got from a local distributor and sterilized. Once fermentation stopped, I used 3/4 teaspoon per bottle and my result was quite pleasing. No beer bombs ! 
and nice head when poured into a frosty mug . I'm new at this too so any feedback would be great. I love some of the ideas I heard so far from folks who have used honey and other sugar flvorings to bottle or " prime".
One small problem I am looking to rectify is how to reduce or get rid of the sedimentaion at the bottom once the beer clears during aging.
Thanks and HAPPY BREWING !!!!
Your goal is admiral, but no cigar, we as home brewers will have sedement. It's just natural, It's how it goes. However, If you keg first...I don't know, never been there. can you keg first, get you basic carbs, and then "pour" into bottles and cap??? and retain carbonation? Has anyoneone tried filtering? The wine folks do it. But they don't carbonate. This is a real question, I know cub is a kegger, what's your input?
from what I understand (haven't yet, but will be using my kegs this weekend) you you force cabonate you won't get the yeast at the bottom. This makes sense too because the yeast are the result of introducing additional sugar (priming sugar) and starting yeast reproduction and fermentation again, just enough to produce the CO2 to carbonate.
im4fishnak wrote:
Your goal is admiral, but no cigar, we as home brewers will have sedement. It's just natural, It's how it goes. However, If you keg first...I don't know, never been there. can you keg first, get you basic carbs, and then "pour" into bottles and cap??? and retain carbonation? Has anyoneone tried filtering? The wine folks do it. But they don't carbonate. This is a real question, I know cub is a kegger, what's your input?
You need to get some sort of filler for this. The beer gun and counter-pressure fillers are the most common for bottling after kegging.
I think it's probably been discussed a couple of times, but a lot of us fill bottles straight from the keg with great results. Not exactly good for anyone who is super impatient though, as you need to do it with very little psi, like 1-2 pounds worth.
If you want less sediment, there are two things you can do before bottling. First, give it a longer time to settle out, definitely use a secondary and possibly even a tertiary (which I use when working with fruit). Second, and this really only helps to get the yeast to go to the bottom, is to cold crash it. This is not something you want to do before bottling though, as you need some yeast to help carbonate.
DT
Hey thanks to all you guys with your information.
I've decided to go with experimentation. I've got a 23 litre brew going so when it comes time to bottle I'll be priming some with Glucose, some with Fructose, Some with Demerara, some with a dark brown Muscovado Sugar (contains about 13% molasses) and some with Honey. Hell... if there's one of these that I prefer it's not going to stop me from drinking the others anyway !!!! 
I'll post the results on this thread.
Happy Hopping.
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