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I'm new to this blog and brewing. Recently i put down my first Coopers Real Ale. All went well, great flavor but flat to very slight carbonation in bottles. 1.5 tsp in 1250ml and .5 tsp in 750ml bottles. Is this too little? I wanted to avoid making bombs. It was in primary for 6 days after it had finished working. Any advice out there? Cheers G

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    Priming is best done by weight. What are those volumes of? Presumably water with corn sugar dissolved? What concentration? Additionally, you don't specify the time you allowed for bottle conditioning and the temperature of the bottles during conditioning? Jun 18, 2013 at 4:39

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A typical 20 liter batch uses around 120g of table sugar, or 6g per liter.

One teaspoon of sugar is about 4.2g. So when you used 0.5tsp in 750ml that's 2.1/0.750 = 2.8 grams per liter, which is less than half the typical 6 grams per liter. For 1.5tsp in 1250ml, that's 1.5*4.2/1.25 = 5g/l so much closer, but still undercarbonated - it's quite hard to measure out half a teaspoon so it could easily have been less.

A carbonation calculator can help you find out how much sugar to use.

Rather than adding sugar to each bottle, you are better off weighing the total amount sugar and boiling that in some water and adding that to the bottling bucket before racking from the carboy. Less chance of contamination and weighing errors.

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  • That some great feed back thanks. Yep i definitely under carbonated. And yes used table sugar. These have had 14 days at about 18c.
    – G.P.M.
    Jun 19, 2013 at 1:55

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