I am about a day away from bottling up my first batch of beer. nearest supply place sells little pre-measured, pre-packeted slips of corn sugar to use as the priming sugar. in the future I think I'll look into mail order but for the immediate need (tomorrow) can the more easily found corn syrup be used as a replacement for corn sugar? in a real pinch can regular old granulated sugar be used for this purpose? thanx in advance.

-- B. Lackie - Zone3 (cwrench@hotmail.com), January 26, 2002

Answers

I have used plain old sugar, but then my beer has been judged, by others, to not be that good. You might find an answer on this site, Brewery, http://www.brewery.org/brewery/library/YPrimerMH.html it contains a fairly detailed look at priming.

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), January 26, 2002.

BC, how did you insert the word BREWERY so that I was able to click and go directly to the website?

Would like to be able to do that, too.

-- HV (veggie@ourplace.com), January 26, 2002.

One of the posts a few days ago showed people how to do it. Look under computer in the archives, the post on: COmputer Question-How can I get bold print etc. There are links to html coding and a practice site. What you do is: Type the name of the link you are creating here after the last a, so that the last part looks something like this, when it is complete.

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), January 26, 2002.

It didn't work again, so go to the post I listed and follow it.

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), January 26, 2002.

If you're talking priming a bottle just so it's a fizzy drink when you open it, and all the primary fermentation is already done, then a level standard teaspoon of ordinary granulated sugar per bottle does the job. I'm assuming a bottle here which is approximately 750 ml, and metric measurements.

Wish I'd thought of making "little pre-measured, pre-packeted slips of corn sugar to use as the priming sugar". What a sweet racket!

-- Don Armstrong (from Australia) (darmst@yahoo.com.au), January 26, 2002.

"Rule of thumb" is to use 4 oz of corn sugar to a 5 gallon batch of homebrew as the priming sugar to give "fizz" to the bottled product. Do not use regular sugar as en extender in your brew, or you will get a "wine taste" to your beer. However, you can use regular sugar at bottling without an evil result. My advice is to use corn sugar, as you will get a better finished product, but cane sugar can be used, albeit with a lesser quality finished beer. GL!

-- Brad (homefixer@SacoRiver.net), January 26, 2002.

thanks for the quick answers. decided to be conservative and go with corn sugar this batch.

BC- great url you gave. wealth of info there.

HV- what BC said. Chuck covered this in a clear fashion a short time back. you can also right click on any page, choose "view source" and inspect how the code is written. then copy and paste the good parts.

Don- yes, after the primary. sweet racket indeed. fortunately the shop I bought from seems to be doing it as a convenience (measured for 5 gallon batches) and were not out to scalp me.

Brad- that's what the shop guy advised too. I'll have a bottle or two in addition to the 5 gallons that'll get the corn sugar and think I'll experiment with an alternative sugar.

-thanks all

-- B. Lackie - Zone3 (cwrench@hotmail.com), January 26, 2002.