Natural Carbonation Explained (Carbonating Mead, Wine, Cider and Beer)

so you want a fizzy Brew huh well there's a few ways to accomplish that the easiest is probably natural carbonation but it comes with some caveats there's other ways of doing it forced carbonation is another one kegs all that sort of thing we haven't done that yet though I do have a toy that we need to experiment with natural carbonation how does it work what is it why is it such a weird thing that people seem to have so much trouble with First Let Me Explain during fermentation yeast produce CO2 or gas gas is actually and alcohol okay so during fermentation just a regular plain old fermentation you're going to get bubbles you're actually carbonating that Brew that's why we talk about degassing at the end okay I just want to make that clear a lot of people are confused by that they don't understand why is there bubbles in here and why would I carbonate separately why can't I just bottle that well you can but here's the thing those gases have been around for a while they're during the yeast's fermentation process they could be stressed there's weird flavor favors there's other compounds in there that don't necessarily taste so good so we want to put new gas in there that tastes better than the old gas that's natural carbonation okay the way you do it is very very simple we take a pre-prescribed amount of a fermentable sugar it could be honey it could be apple juice concentrate it could be white sugar it could be corn sugar there's all sorts of ways to do it we tend to use white sugar sometimes honey but usually white sugar and we use one ounce per gallon that's simple there are calculators online that'll help you with adjusting if you know you want this much carbonation there's actually measurements for the amount of carbonation if you know how much you want you can go to a calculator online and find out exactly how much to add perfectly fine not a problem we tend to go with the one ounce general rule of thumb okay one ounce or 28 grams per gallon now the way we do it is we have our whole fermenter right and it's filled with our liquid we add that to the fermenter or to a pitcher generally because you you want it to be racked so there's no leaves in there and we mix that through so we now have a homogeneous liquid with all the sugars in there yes there are carbonation drops which are essentially just sugar pills in theory you can put those right into the bottle and it's totally fine um I I'm sure there's some amount of variance in those but they're probably better than using the teaspoon method what do I mean by the teaspoon method where you take a teaspoon or a half teaspoon of sugar and you pour it into each and every bottle well here's the problem with that if you do that you are probably not getting exactly the same amount in each bottle so you're going to varying levels of carbonation if you do a little bit too much you might get a bottle bomb if you have not enough you might not get any carbonation or not enough carbonation that's why I like the homogeneous method pouring it right in together mixing it all through and then filling your bottles once the bottles are full cap them then they go into what we call the bomb shelter our bomb shelter is literally just a plastic tub from Lowe's and we just put them in there cover it up and put it in the other room leave it in there for a couple of weeks usually at that point what's happening inside that bottle is you have a capped bottle with the active yeast still in suspension because yeast don't actually die when fermentation is over they go into suspended animation they go dormant but now we just gave them some sugars so what they do is the yeast comes back to life begins to Chow Down on those sugars and makes a little bit more alcohol and it makes CO2 or carbon dioxide which is your carbonate carbonation inside those bottles yes that's right natural carbonation is just a mini fermentation a lot of people don't get that part right and they get confused so if you pasteurize and then think you're going to naturally carbonate you got to add more yeast otherwise you can't do it that way and here's the thing if you pasteurize to stop fermentation and then you add more yeast to naturally carbonate guess what you're making bottle bombs don't do that okay I'll explain that one a little bit more in detail let me explain what I mean we had some questions on this someone said that they pasteurized before they add priming sugar to carbonate okay now here's the problem that if there's a lot of sugars you keep it sweet by pasteurizing right but your yeast weren't done then you're adding more sugar and you have to add more yeast or else it will not carbonate so when you do that now you're just creating a situation where the yeast are now alive and they're going to go after those sugars you didn't kill the sugars you killed the yeast okay that's a very very important thing to understand if none of that made any sense we do actually have videos explaining a lot more of the fermentation process and things like that for you know gravities and alcohol tolerance that sort of thing this is about natural carbonation so let me get back on track we have a little tiny fermentation happening in those bottles but because it's capped it's being contained so it builds up pressure inside that bottle if you have too much sugar in there those bottles could explode so you want to make sure that you're using a pressure available bottle in other words a beer bottle or a bottle that's held pressure before we like the Ali lemonade bottles they're like two bucks and they come with free lemonade these are an amazing swing top bottle okay they're incredible that bottle can hold the carbonation if you put it into just a straight up wine bottle or something it might not hold it and it could boom explode that's a dangerous thing flying glass not to mention the mess that's in there so it's a bad idea and this is where people get scared of natural fermentation and most of the time it's because they learn to put a teaspoon of sugar in every bottle well a teaspoon of sugar is a lot of sugar when you really think about it so you put that into a 12 ounce bottle it could be way too much for the amount that you're making and it could cause pressure to build up and explode or it could be too much for a 16 or 25 of just trust me the one ounce per gallon works it's a tried and true method we've been doing it this way for years hundreds of and hundreds of bottles and not one has ever blown up now we do use swing tops in most cases I know people that use the the pop-on Caps if it's not popped on properly like a bottle Capper it could pop off okay but it's more likely that a bad seal cap is going to come off before the bottle would explode so that's a good thing whereas the uh the swing tops that we use they are a Rubber seal So in theory if there's too much pressure buildup it'll release some of that before it explodes the bottle so it's just an extra little bit of safety there are some screw-on bottles for pressurization um someone told me um Adam one of our mods said that they're more common in the UK than they are in the U.S I've not really seen many like that but apparently they do exist I know some beverages come that way but to reuse that would be a little bit of a different story after the week or two is done your bottles are carbonated at that point you can store them on the Shelf room temperature no problem room temperature I mean like whatever you keep your house at you don't have to have a special temperature set for that I know room temperature varies wildly depending on where in the world you happen to be but that's the idea you can store them at room temperature when you want to consume these because normally carbonated beverages are consumed cold and there's a very good reason for that when you chill a carbonated beverage what happens is it contracts I don't know the science behind this but it contracts and it keeps that CO2 in suspension in the liquid that much better whereas if it's warm that CO2 wants to escape faster so that's where you get the gusher effect but if you keep it cold just before you're going to consume it what we usually do is you know a few hours before we're going to do a tasting or a day before we put a bottle in the fridge and that way we have it ready or if we want to drink one we put them in the fridge and that way it's good to go and it doesn't gush that's a very important thing because we've had people say oh I had way too much pressurization well did you or did you try drinking it warm and if you have hot bottles like if they're heated even worse this is going to go all over the place but do not think that keeping them in the refrigerator will stop fermentation if you are trying to do that like just do the cold crash thing in a bottle don't do that um as Paul one of our other mods will tell you he had a friend that did that they put some bottles in the fridge thinking they were going to stop fermentation well it slows down but they uh they had an explosion of several bottles in their fridge which I can't imagine that that was good for the fridge or anything else that was in that refrigerator so keep that in mind too it's just not a good thing to go so to summarize natural carbonation is actually a type of fermentation you generally want to do it with a dry beverage I didn't mention that earlier but you want to start with a dry beverage because if it's got any sweetness in it at all that's now going to add to that fermentation you don't want to do that you can use non-fermentable sugars though to keep the sweetness level up but technically from a fermentation standpoint that is a dry beverage because there's no actual fermentable sweetener in there then you want to store them seal field you want to use pressure regulated bottles bottles that can handle the pressure you want to store them for a couple of weeks let the carbonation do its thing and you want to chill it before you serve them to keep more of the beverage in the bottle and in your glass than on the floor and the ceiling as always guys thanks so much for watching and have a great day

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 16,350

Keywords: natural carbonation, bottle conditioning, hard cider brewing, hard cider carbonation, bottle conditioning mead, bottle conditioning yeast, bottle conditioning homebrew, priming sugar for carbonation

Id: ZnFMPJ5vGTA

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023