No Priming Small Beer

[5mooth0perator]

I have a beer recipe, that I have been making that by my calculations is nearly non-alcoholic. I estimate after priming that it is 1% abv at most.

One thing I have been thinking I would like to try is to skip the priming step. EG after I inoculate the wort wait a day or two then bottle.

I've been using 1lb ginger, 2lb sweet potatoes, .5 lb oats for my fermentables.

I prime with about 10.5 oz table sugar to get a nice bubbly carb.

Is there a good way to figure out how to do it without the priming step?

 

[Lefou]

It's going to be difficult to skip the priming step when bottle carbing.
An alternative method to eliminate priming altogether would be leaving the bottles behind and move on to kegging.

 

[5mooth0perator]

I think next iteration, I can break out the hydrometer, and measure the actual amount of alcohol produced, then work out the amount of co2 like this thread:

http://community.mrbeer.com/topic/1070-alcohol-content/

 

[Jag75]

Could you use a soda stream to slightly carb then bottle and cap . Take a while but would allow you to skip priming sugar .

 

[5mooth0perator]

Yeah, the keg comment above, made me think I'm basically reinventing the wheel.

I add water back after the mash and steep(split boil style).

I think I'll just take gravity readings to see where I stand. I think some of the conventional root beer kits use one step ferment/prime in the bottle.

 

[z-bob]

I have a beer recipe, that I have been making that by my calculations is nearly non-alcoholic. I estimate after priming that it is 1% abv at most.

One thing I have been thinking I would like to try is to skip the priming step. EG after I inoculate the wort wait a day or two then bottle.

I've been using 1lb ginger, 2lb sweet potatoes, .5 lb oats for my fermentables.

I prime with about 10.5 oz table sugar to get a nice bubbly carb.

Is there a good way to figure out how to do it without the priming step?

There's not a good way, but there is a way. Bottle it PET plastic soda bottles (I like the 1 liter size), and when the bottles get hard you know it's almost done. Move them to refrigeration at that point to slow down the fermentation and also to reduce the CO2 pressure. If a bottle does explode (unlikely; those bottles can handle a lot of pressure) you have a mess to clean up instead of flying shards of glass *and* a mess.

 

[TwistedGray]

Could you use a soda stream to slightly carb then bottle and cap . Take a while but would allow you to skip priming sugar .

Been there, done that, it's not a very good tool but kind of sort of almost works ... in a pinch

 

[Josephryanevan]

What’s a beer like this taste like? I’m intrigued by your list of fermentables.

 

[5mooth0perator]

Mostly, it's hard to explain with so many ingredients and flavorings that vary from batch to batch. The sweet potato is subtle and meshes well with the earthiness of the various spices, like sassafras and sarsaparilla, ginger is prominent and I've found that I need much less hops and the black malt, as the spices are bitter. I use lactic acid bacteria and gypsum, which give it soda like acidity and palette, the oats yield a nice head and surprising mouth feel for a light beer.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

Typically you'll have just under 1vol of CO2 already dissolved from the early stages of a fermentation, and if you then bottle it you'll get about 0.6vol CO2 per gravity point. So if you bottle at 1.012 and FG is 1.010 then you'll end up with bottles carbonated with just over 2 volumes of CO2 which is fairly typical for ale - you might bottle at 1.013 or 1.014 for lager levels of carbonation.

Note how super-sensitive this system is though, you really to know what your FG is going to be (test ferment one bottle at 90F just to see what FG it ends up at, before the main batch is ready?) and to accurately measure your current gravity. Most homebrewers start getting nervous about ordinary beer bottles exploding above 3.5 volumes CO2 or so, so you don't really want to bottle more than 4 points above FG.

If you're adding 10.5oz of table sugar to 5 US gallons and then bottling immediately and it ferments right out, that implies 4.8 volumes at room temperature. Which is certainly on the lively side!

 

[AZCoolerBrewer]

Priming sugar adds about half a percent ABV .004 SG. If your beer is truly 1% ABV after priming then you could conceivably inoculate and bottle immediately. If you have measured your OG and FG and it drops .004 between the two then your good to go.

 

[5mooth0perator]

Typically you'll have just under 1vol of CO2 already dissolved from the early stages of a fermentation, and if you then bottle it you'll get about 0.6vol CO2 per gravity point. So if you bottle at 1.012 and FG is 1.010 then you'll end up with bottles carbonated with just over 2 volumes of CO2 which is fairly typical for ale - you might bottle at 1.013 or 1.014 for lager levels of carbonation.

Note how super-sensitive this system is though, you really to know what your FG is going to be (test ferment one bottle at 90F just to see what FG it ends up at, before the main batch is ready?) and to accurately measure your current gravity. Most homebrewers start getting nervous about ordinary beer bottles exploding above 3.5 volumes CO2 or so, so you don't really want to bottle more than 4 points above FG.

If you're adding 10.5oz of table sugar to 5 US gallons and then bottling immediately and it ferments right out, that implies 4.8 volumes at room temperature. Which is certainly on the lively side!

6.5 gallon batch is 4.0 volumes. This is a good idea, and probably where I am heading. Would dissolved CO2 change the FG readings, or would I just see if it goes champagne, when I open it.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

So for reference, carbonating with the CO2 from the last of the primary fermentation like this is called spunding. The real problem is that you can't measure it as accurately as weighing out priming sugar. So I'd urge you not to spund to 4vol of CO2, which is already on the edge of bottle bomb territory. Aim for 2.5vol in the first instance, and then work up from there - bottle bombs are bad, both from a potential loss of the contents but also the risk of it bombing when you're handling it, hands and broken bottle glass are a bad combination.

 

[5mooth0perator]

So for reference, carbonating with the CO2 from the last of the primary fermentation like this is called spunding. The real problem is that you can't measure it as accurately as weighing out priming sugar. So I'd urge you not to spund to 4vol of CO2, which is already on the edge of bottle bomb territory. Aim for 2.5vol in the first instance, and then work up from there - bottle bombs are bad, both from a potential loss of the contents but also the risk of it bombing when you're handling it, hands and broken bottle glass are a bad combination.

Ah yes spunding: http://community.mrbeer.com/topic/1070-alcohol-content/

And 1% just happens to be the magical number to spund.

It makes me wonder what the yield on my sweet potato, ginger, oat and black malt mash actually is, I might have to bump up the proportions.

 

[5mooth0perator]

I guess is sweet potato is only 20% carbohydrate(70% water), so that would be like an upper bound under ideal conditions, with my 2lb recipe that would only be 6.4 ounces anyway.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/sweet-potatoes#section1

 

[5mooth0perator]

not to bump an old thread, but I've gotten around to trying this spunding thing.

It seems there are some practical details. To pitching yeast directly to bottles, namely pitching and filtering.

 

[5mooth0perator]

not to bump an old thread, but I've gotten around to trying this spunding thing.

It seems there are some practical details. To pitching yeast directly to bottles, namely pitching and filtering.

So I solved some of the practical issues with direct to spunding. EG, I calculated a theoretical maximum sugar content based on starch percentage. Also, a 75 micron nylon nut bag works as a nice filter, so I can pitch the yeast directly into the wort, let it dissolve then bottle.

The results are pretty good. I used a mixture of PEG bottles and glass bottles. The PEG bottles swelled up and got tight, but the carbonation was much less than I had achieved before, definitely non-alcoholic, as measured by volumes of CO2 produced.

I think the only odd issue is the DMS. I seem to remember this from my early experiments with cold crashing root beer, if I didn't boil for a long time or let it vigorously ferment I ended up extraneous sulfur. Can I fix that a little with water chemistry? Maybe I might try boiling my flavor malts with the spices.

I think one nice property is it tastes extremely fresh, eg no oxygen exposure during bottling.