back into brewing after 5 years.

[helluvatractor]

hi all, matt here from north devon.
i was quite into wine and beermaking five or six years ago, but for some reason stopped.
now my wife wants to make her own wine, so we have bought a couple kits and they are coming along nicely, we plan to gather the necessary equipment and make country wines when the season comes into swing. i

i've also got a few batches of carton juice wines and experimented with apple juices for cyser and ciders.

i have bought a 40 pint extra special bitter kit which came highly recommended by my local homebrew shop and used light spray malt instead of sugar.

i've recently aquired 48 450ml grolsch bottles which i intend to use to bottle this bitter, i do have a couple of questions;

bit confused as to how much priming sugar to add when bottling. from what i gather i fill the bottles about 2 inches from the top , (this will mean there is about 400ml of beer in the bottle), is a teaspoon of sugar too much? and a lot of people reccommend making a syrup with the sugar, but how much water / sugar ratio and how much syrup would i add? i have measuring syrynges so i could be quite accurate.

also the kit contains a sachet of isom hop extract which it says to add at the barrelling stage if you desire a more bitter beer, well, i'd like to try half the bottles with the hop extract and half without. what would be the best way of doing this? filling half bottles from the primary FV, then racking this into another bin, adding half the sachet, then filling the remining bottles ??

any help appreciated, many thanks.

 

[Berk]

Hello and welcome.

Since it sounds like you have two bins, I would probably batch prime. Make a sugar syrup with the correct amount of sugar for the full batch and put it in your second bin, then syphon the beer from the primary into the bin, avoid splashing, and this should mix with the sugar solution priming it in one go. A gentle stir might work to make sure it's fully mixed, just avoid aerating the beer. You can then bottle from the secondary bin, adding (half of?) the hop solution to the last half of the beer.

Racking into the second bin should also mean you'll get less sediment in your bottles when you fill them as you will have hopefully left most of it in the primary FV.

I'm not sure if that would necessarily be the best way to go about things, but it's how I would probably do it.

 

[dennisking]

Hi and welcome.

 

[helluvatractor]

Thanks berk, good advice there, cheers

 

[Papa G]

Hi, welcome to the forum :

 

[joe1002]

Welcome to the forum :

 

[CaptainMallard]

Hello Matt, and welcome to the forum! :thumb:

 

[mattyhall22]

Hello and Welcome :