priming sugar

sorry -it has been a long time brewing ale and porter; but i am going to get back into it again. I looked at all of my old notes - but - Do not remember about the step of the priming sugar. I believe i added it on the last rack prior to bottling so that it was integrated into the ale when it was being racked. does this sound correct? 5 oz of priming sugar I have in my notes. This way I did not have to add a bit into each bottle - it was all int the bottling bucket waiting to go for bottling. thank you.

follow up question too - how many 12 oz or 22 oz bottles are needed to bottle a batch of ale? I believe they are 5 gallon batches that are standard yes, so how many cases does this make? thank you.

Dissolve the priming sugar in warm (boiled and cooled) water and add it to the bottling bucket just before you transfer the beer to the bottling bucket. If you do it any earlier than that the sugar will ferment in the fermenter, you want that to happen in the bottle.

Also, 5oz won’t hurt, but its more than you really need for most styles. Check out northern brewer’s online priming calculator, or look at the reference in Palmer’s How To Brew.

Google is your friend for this one. Basic calculations and unit conversions are built in to google, so if you type “5 gallons to oz” you will see there are 640 oz in 5 gallons, which is 53 12 oz bottles. In reality you probably don’t quite end up with 5 gallons finished product, so you may fill a few less. This is way handy for brewing, any time you need to do any kind of unit conversion type is straight into google.

Boil 3 cups of water & the sugar for 5 minutes or so to sanitize. Add it to bottling bucket before transfer. Don’t worry about cooling if you don’t want to. I never did.

128oz in a gallon, 640 oz in a 5 gallon batch, just do the math for how many bottles you’ll need, depending on what size bottles you use and how many. I used to do a mix of 12 & 22oz.

You would need 29 22 ounce bottles and 52 12 ounce bottles. Plus a couple extra in case your volume is slightly more than 5 gallons. Extras also take care of broken bottles if the unthinkable happens.
Google Conversion Calculator. A very nice tool to have on your desk top. Extremely handy for converting ml, grams, and ounces.

tried posting a response 2x and it never appeared. not sure what is going on. thanks you guys! I really appreciate all of the quick replies.

not sure why this did not post…

thank you. No a big fan of google anymore. they confiscate too much info on everyone. worse than big brother.

anyway, 5 oz is what i always did and what was suggested years ago and also contained in some of the kits back then.

wow - so you are talking about at least 4 cases of 12 oz bottles on hand for a batch. I started with 12 oz but went to the pint 22 oz ones so maybe that was just less cases and bottles. Just been a while.

:slight_smile:

i used to make all of my batches from my own recipes and ingredients - just will start back in with a few kit batches to get in the groove again.

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i just looked at the online instructions for their cream ale kit just for the heck of it and they had:

Approximatelytwocasesofeither12ozor22ozpry-off style beer bottles

so go figure.

I almost made this mistake too… a case is 24 bottles. A 12 pack is actually half a case… so four twelve packs, or two cases…

I think a case off 22oz is 12, but a case of 12oz is 24, as mentioned. Gotta keep is confusing!