[Lazy Ant Brewing]

I'm chilling a stout now to clear the brew and plan to bottle Sunday afternoon.  My son will be arriving from out-of-state Wed. evening and leaving on Sunday May 27th, and I'd like to get a few bottles carbonated within 5 or 6 days of bottling.

The priming sugar will be going in to cold beer.  Normally, I would just put the bottled beer in my utility room where it would get a bit of additional warmth from the water heater and let the carbonation proceed at its own pace.

 Would it do any harm to take a few of the bottles and put them in a sink full of hot water to raise the temperature quickly or would that stress the yeast?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

[Big Monk]

I'm chilling a stout now to clear the brew and plan to bottle Sunday afternoon.  My son will be arriving from out-of-state Wed. evening and leaving on Sunday May 27th, and I'd like to get a few bottles carbonated within 5 or 6 days of bottling.

The priming sugar will be going in to cold beer.  Normally, I would just put the bottled beer in my utility room where it would get a bit of additional warmth from the water heater and let the carbonation proceed at its own pace.

 Would it do any harm to take a few of the bottles and put them in a sink full of hot water to raise the temperature quickly or would that stress the yeast?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

What was the OG of the beer?

[jtoots]

I would think that would stress the yeast, depending on how "hot" you're thinking

[Big Monk]

A better idea would be to use a tight floccing dry yeast, like Lallemand CBC-1, and dose the bottles with 0.5-1 M/ml cells.

[Lazy Ant Brewing]

OG of the beer was 1.046.  FG is 1.008. 

I was thinking about leaving the bottles in 100 F water until the water cooled to room temp. 

I wouldn't know how to dose with dry yeast.  Please explain the process.

Thanks 

[Big Monk]

OG of the beer was 1.046.  FG is 1.008. 

I was thinking about leaving the bottles in 100 F water until the water cooled to room temp. 

I wouldn't know how to dose with dry yeast.  Please explain the process.

Thanks

So normally for a beer of this gravity, unless you were trying to condition the beers with active yeast, you wouldn't add additional yeast at bottling time, but because you'd like to try and get some bottles carbed in a short time frame, it may be a good idea. In fact it may be the only idea.

So:

Let's assume you have 5 gallons of beer to package. We will use 1 M cells/ml as our bottling rate and also assume that the dry yeast in question has 20 B cells/g. First thing you want to do is convert the packaged volume to ml:

5 * 3.785 * 1000 = 18,925 ml

Then you want to find out how many grams of dry yeast to add to your sugar slurry. Since we now have the volume in ml and we already know the dosing rate and cells/g, we can calculate the amount in grams of dry yeast:

( ( V (ml) / Cell Density (B cells/g) ) * 0.001 ) * Dose Rate (M cells/ml)

( ( 18,925 / 20 ) *0.001 ) * 1 = 0.946 g or ~ 1 g of dry yeast

[Lazy Ant Brewing]

I don't know if I could get the CBC-1 that you mentioned by Sunday.  I do have US05 in the fridge.  Would that work?

Thanks

[Big Monk]

I don't know if I could get the CBC-1 that you mentioned by Sunday.  I do have US05 in the fridge.  Would that work?

Thanks

Sure. Any clean ale yeast will do. I only mentioned CBC-1 because it floccs hard into a tight cake. No worries if you can't get that.

[Lazy Ant Brewing]

Thanks much.

[dmtaylor]

If you could put the bottles under a cardboard box with an old incandescent light bulb for several days (just leave the light on the whole time), with the intent of keeping the temperature to about 90-95 F, the bottles should carbonate fast with whatever yeast you have in there -- no need to use any special yeast.  You'd want to monitor the temperature to ensure it doesn't get upward to 110 F or so, which could kill the yeast.  If it got that hot, punch holes in the box to let some heat out and continue to monitor.

This *should* work really well, if you can figure out the best way to make it work.

[Lazy Ant Brewing]

I may try D.M. Taylor's idea, but in the meantime I tried Big Monk's formula for US 05 using the 6B cells/g from  another website.  My calculations come out to almost 3 grams of dry yeast which seems like a lot.

Comments please and thanks to all for your advice.

[Big Monk]

I may try D.M. Taylor's idea, but in the meantime I tried Big Monk's formula for US 05 using the 6B cells/g from  another website.  My calculations come out to almost 3 grams of dry yeast which seems like a lot.

Comments please and thanks to all for your advice.

The only reason I'd be wary of Dave's idea is the elevated temperature. Whatever works for you.

6 B cells/g is pretty low. Shoot the middle and do 14 B cells/g if it makes you feel better. And drop down the dose rate lower than 1 M cells/ml. I suggested the higher rate due to the time constraints.

[Lazy Ant Brewing]

6 B cells/g is what US05 yields as dry yeast out of the package. 

So are you suggesting that I double the dosage?  That would require about 6 grams or one-half of the package.

Does that sound correct?

Thanks

[Big Monk]

6 B cells/g is what US05 yields as dry yeast out of the package. 

So are you suggesting that I double the dosage?  That would require about 6 grams or one-half of the package.

Does that sound correct?

Thanks

Well, that's a whole other debate. There are some cell counts out there by Terrill that show dry yeast densities at upwards of 20 B/g, although I have some personal correspondance from R&D people at Lallemand and Fermentis that shows a more reasonable 8-10 B/g.

You have to take with a grain of salt the densities listed on the packaging, as they state that they guarantee >= X amount of viable cells at end of life.

The reason I say split the difference is it falls on the conservative side between 10 and 20 B/g. Only way to know for sure is to count.

[dmtaylor]

I've been bottling every batch since 1998.  I can very confidently say that you definitely do NOT need to add any more yeast.  If you do, you'll just have a ton of sludge on the bottom of every bottle, but no advantage from adding it.

I thought of one other concern with my above recommendation of cardboard & light bulb --- be sure to shield the bottles from the light to avoid skunking.  This can be done very simply by covering the bottles with a cloth so they aren't hit by direct light.