Increasing alcohol content in beer question.

[treeferreefer]

This might be a stupid question but, I was wondering if it is possible to increase alcohol content in home brew by priming the keg (similar to bottling) and letting your keg sit for a few days before hooking it up to your kegerator?


Thanks,



Aaron

[Richard]

Yes + no:

* You'd want to do that in a carboy probably, as more fermentation = more yeast = you don't want that in the keg.
* If you're adding significant enough plain sugar (sucrose, rather than maltose), you may end up with undesirable levels of acetyldehide or other spoilers.

I did this once to a kit beer (before I knew better): take a bunch of honey (I think I used about a kilo), and a bunch of mangoes (I used two). Peel + blend the mangoes, and boil the hell out of the paste mixed with water. Dissolve the honey, cool, pitch into fermenter. Bumped the beer up by one or two % abv.

Beer tasted alright... definitely not something to brag about though (although I've yet to have a syrup-kit beer that is).

[Dave Savoie]

Your better off raising the ABV prior to kegging so that you can adjust your malts and hops so that it will be balanced

beertools.com is a good site    if you hit print once you have filled out the recipe it will show you a chart that will allow you to balance accordingly

[Kyle]

As long as you haven't used a superfine filter (like <0.5 microns), then you can just put back in a secondary, add a pound or more of boiled and cooled malt extract, and then give a few days to re-ferment.  You can use corn, cane, or beet sugar as well, but the flavour is less than pleasant. The affect of priming sugar on abv is insignificant.


What kind of beer is it?

[Kyle]

If you are going for high-abv beers, they can be made to taste great, but they need much more time than usual. I generally age my strongest ales (9-13.8% abv) for several months to balance out. My 2011 Barley wine, for example I will be starting this spring with the intention of drinking in next winter.


But you can certainly boost the abv without waiting long, just don't expect a perfectly balanced brew.

[Brian_S]

Might I recommend a 21% ABV all grain beer?
http://www.byo.com/stories/techniques/a ... grain-beer
I'm far too lazy....seriously who cans wort.

On another note I did my Barleywine (9.2%) in Nov 2010, Kegged a few weeks back and will tap for Christmas 2011.  The boozy burn just doesn't make for good beer until it mellows like Kyle said. Did I mention the 21% ABV all grain beer?

B

[Kyle]

18 gal of wort boiled down to 4 gal: well Brain, that looks pretty good, but I'll be tweaking a recipe I've done previously. I'll post it once its brewed

[Richard]

I'd be down with a group-effort on the 21% monster... I'm guessing that like me, most people do not have the kit to boil 18 gallons of wort down

There are other approaches involving a shit-load of dextrose, but I'm not so sure I buy into that concept...

[Brian_S]

I think we have a plan.