Picaroons Competition Entry Carbonation

[Jake]

How are most people carboning their bottles of beer for this? Right from the keg or carbing with sugar in bottle for a couple weeks?

[brew]

I'm using my super secret super duper carbing filter complete with the auto taste enhancing siphoning spoon and the organic fusel remover...

Really just going to overcarb a bit and then pour from the tap into a bottle - that is if my entries makes it to entry day... 

[Chris Craig]

I had this same question.  Could I just pour from the tap into a bottle, and cap?  Would it survive a couple of weeks?

[fakr]

don't think it will survive well Chris.  I was thinking of pouring from the tap, then adding about half the required bottling sugar so it would slightly carbonate and keep a good pressure....hopefully it works!

Either that or fill from the tap and put the bottles in a 65C water bath for 10 minutes to pasturize.

[Jake]

Well I'd say with this style it'd be better to be under than over-carbbed.

I was thinking about just putting some priming sugar in a bottle and capping. If I recall correctly, I used to put about an even teaspoon of priming sugar per 500ml bottle. I'm thinking for this, I may try cutting it down to either a half teaspoon or 1/3 for low carbonation. I suppose there's enough time for me to experiment with a bottle or two and see what happens ... it's been a long time since I've bottled!!

I don't use any of those fancy beersmith tools. Would beersmith/beertools/other tell you how many grams of priming sugar to use to hit 1-1.5 volumes of CO2?

[Waterlogged]

It would, based on volume of beer and temperature at bottleing.

[Jake]

On another note, assuming I'm using a couple grams of sugar per 500mL bottle of beer, any reason to be concerned about contamination in the bottle? Most people seem to boil sugar to sterilize and mix into entire batch, but this doesn't really seem to make sense for only a couple bottles.

[Brian_S]

Wow, thats a whole lot of words for "just add some priming sugar to a bottle and fill, let sit a week or so" old school!  I've bottled well over 100 gal and have never boiled the sugar nor have I had an infection.....now the beer never last long mind you.   

Just think about how time comsuming it was when you had to bottle the whole f__king batch as you fill 4 bottles.

B

[fakr]

Hey Jake,

I've also toyed around with the idea of filling the bottles with over carbonated beer from a growler filler...

I've always found that bottles filled with a growler filler\tap, only last a couple of days, but only carbonation wise, not taste\quality...

maybe bottling with over carbonated beer would put it right at the low carbonation level we're looking for.

I might actually try that with some beer I have on tap now.

[Jake]

I tried adding about 1/4 tsp of table sugar to my 500ml bottle entries ... we'll see how they turn out.

[Kyle]

I have bottled from the tap with intentionally over carbed beer, that works very well. Pour cold and avoid disturbing the dissolved C02 as much as possible.

[Al-Loves-Wine]

Something I do with decent success bottling from the keg is to chill all my bottles before filling.

Co2 shrinks when its cold, so I figure if the bottles are cold when the cold carbonated beer hits them, there is no warmth of the bottle to drive off co2 as its poured in. I've left bottles a month plus like this and all my beers have poured with decent carbonation. I use my filling wand and it fits perfectly into the picnic faucet for filing bottles with minimal foam, of course I dial back my pressure to around 4-5lbs.