Batch priming with honey

[Ben2083]

I am just wondering if anyone here has any experience of batching priming for bottling with honey?


I have brewed a winter warmer ale from Greg Hughes’ book, which has some honey in at the end of the boil but hasn’t quite had the full impact on flavour I was expecting (I was a little short on quantity) so thought I’d have a go at priming with honey as understand this can contribute to the flavour. I usually batch prime and am curious as to how well it with mix in with the fermented beer compared to sugar dissolved in boiled water.


I could bottle prime individually I suppose, but I prefer to batch prime as I find I get much more even carbonation and it is a lot less faff.

 

[Brightonnik]

You won't get much honey flavour if any. Have you considered racking the beer onto it in secondary? I would boil it with a touch of water to be on the safe side.

 

[Horners]

No experience but sure I read that honey full of wild bacteria.

 

[Petrolhead]

It's an interesting subject and I'm no expert but the missus keeps bees so the following is from a foggy memory.

Honey can effectively be kept forever in a cool dry environment because it contains no water but oddly contains plenty of microscopic nasties including Botulism but they are only present in an inert state. However, they are able to start multiplying in the right conditions.

I would have thought watered down in a nice warm temperature would be one of them.

 

[Ben2083]

Hummmm, ok, I think there is enough here to put me off giving this a go for now, will stick with priming with sugar and just up the honey in the boil next time I brew it.

Thinking about it, I never did hear again off the guy who said he had primed his stout with honey.......I hope he is ok!

 

[peebee]

You can pasteurise the honey before adding. I.E. heat a solution to 60-70C (?), hold for a few (?) minutes, and then cool. But that seems like a lot of phaffing for priming. You should pasteurise honey before adding to cooling wort to preserve the perfumes, but most folk just add it near the end of boil and ignore the resulting loss of flavours (don't know why, the same people probably jump through hoops to preserve volatile hop flavours).

 

[Leon103]

I have done it once. Had a couple of bottle bombs and all the other bottles were super fizzy