Bottle carbing

[KenK]

Can we use DME to bottle carb beer instead of priming sugar? I don't necessarily want to -- just wondering if it's possible and how it affects the beer. Also, if it only takes three or four days to ferment a batch, why does it take at least two weeks to bottle carb?

 

[jeffpn]

DME is sugar. It'd work. I'm pretty sure there's charts that tell you how much to use of whatever your using. As far as length of time, the yeast is tired. It worked hard fermenting your batch. There's less of it suspended in the beer to ferment the priming sugar.

 

[chub1]

You can,yes.Was told it would produce a finer head. I have tried using beer enhancer,which apparently is ok as well. Only did it three times and ended up with gushers in two brews.I used the calculator available on here and took a midway amount bettween corn sugar and spray malt .Went back to sugar and stayed with it ever since.

 

[GFHomebrew]

Sugar is cheaper than DME too.

 

[Nosybear]

Sugar is cheaper than DME too.

DME can also leave a "bathtub ring" of protein and gunk around the bottle's neck and I've read of it producing off-flavors when used to prime. Sugar is far cheaper. In fact, there's no good reason to use the more expensive corn sugar - just whatever you sweeten your tea with.

 

[J A]

The less than one ounce per gallon of sugar that you're using to carb is such a small percentage of your overall fermentables that it'll have negligible effect. You could use invert sugar in the form of the carb drops instead of table sugar and it might be theoretically superior in flavor, but I don't think you'd ever pick out the odd one in a triangle test between the two.
Depending on several factors (mainly temperature), bottles can carb in as little as 4 days, but waiting 10-14 days before chilling insures consistent carbonation for the whole batch.