After your yeast has converted the sugars in your beer to alcohol, it’s time to condition your beer. Conditioning is the process of adding sugar to your batch before bottling, which creates carbon dioxide—aka fizz. It’s the big build to the most important event, which is getting to enjoy that beer you’ve spent several weeks coaxing into a grown-up drink.
Carbonation is essential to good beer and contributes quite a bit of character to how it tastes. If your beer is under carbonated, it might feel heavy and flat. If your beer is over carbonated, its aroma may be muted and the flavor could be overly acidic. Striking the right balance is key.
But before you toss your beer into a few dozen bottles and call it good, make sure your beer has finished fermenting. If it’s not done, you’re going to have lots of messes to clean up after you snap off the cap. Or worse, the bottles could explode. This happened to me several years ago, and it’s not something to take lightly. We’d put the bottles in our basement to condition, and several days later we heard a loud pop. We found shards of glass sticking out of the ceiling, walls, and everything else they could penetrate. If we—or worse, one of our children—had been in the room when that happened, I don’t even want to think about how that would have played out. Now I understand why some brewers store their bottled beer in sturdy boxes or plastic tubs with lids!
When you’re certain your beer has finished fermenting, it’s time to bottle. You need to select the right priming sugar for your beer, then add it to 2 cups (472 ml) of boiling water before you let it cool. Corn sugar is probably used most often for priming, and the standard amount for a five-gallon (19 l) batch is ¾ cup. It’s cheap, doesn’t add any flavor, and it’s pretty easy to find at a homebrew supply store. But if you want to get out of the comfort zone, you can try a myriad of other sugars. Let’s look at a few.
White Table Sugar
White table sugar is the sugar you buy at the store to make cookies. It’s inexpensive and available just about everywhere you can buy food. White sugar, like corn sugar, won’t change the flavor of your beer, so it’s a great option if you don’t want to enhance the taste further.
Black Treacle (Molasses)
Brewing a dark beer? Molasses could be a great addition, and it adds lots of flavor to the beer. However, you might be surprised to learn that this adds more of a caramel flavor than a molasses flavor. If you want a molasses flavor, add the molasses to your boil, then use a flavorless priming sugar.
Turbinado Sugar
Turbinado sugar is “sugar in the raw” that you probably see at many restaurants. Its crystals are larger than cane sugar’s and are light brown. Turbinado sugar isn’t quite as sweet as white sugar, but it has a richer flavor—that said, it doesn’t add a lot of flavor to your beer. It should be treated the same as you would white sugar.
Brown Sugar
Brown sugar is an easy-to-find sugar that’s fairly inexpensive, and you probably have a package in your pantry already. The lighter the brown sugar, the less flavor it will impart. If you’re looking to add more depth, try a darker brown sugar such as Muscovado. But be warned that Muscavado is fairly expensive and isn’t found in most grocery stores, so you’ll likely have to order it ahead of time.
Dry Malt Extract
Dry malt extract, also known as DME, is a great alternative to corn sugar. Interestingly, it results in smaller bubbles, which could add some interesting characteristics to your batch. Additionally, it ranges from light to dark, and the darker the DME, the more flavor it will add.
Honey
Honey is definitely not your most cost-effective option, but you’ll find several varieties on the shelf, and can even delve into artisanal varieties. Lighter honeys won’t add a lot of flavor, but darker varieties will. I suggest saving the artisanal honeys for lighter beers so the flavor can shine through a little more.
Maple Syrup
Maple syrup has seen an uptick in price over the years, but it can add some interesting features to your flavor. Look for a darker syrup that will give you the most bang for your buck because the lighter ones might not add much more flavor than corn sugar.
Once you’ve decided on your priming sugar, you’re going to want to make sure you’re getting the right amount of carbonation for the beer you’re brewing, and you’re going to want to get it right. Northern Brewer has a calculator for that. Plug in the style of beer you’re making, the temperature, and the volume of your beer. The calculator will show you the types of priming sugars available, as well as the amount you should use for your batch.
Happy priming!