Amount / Type of sugar to Carbonate E1118

[Varsis]

Started a batch with some pineapple.
3 gallon carboy.
i'm looking for the forumla, with out much avail, to carbonate the mead, in the bottle.
What type of sugar to add at the end of the fermentation cycle, and how much of it to add.

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[fatbloke]

Well, ferment it dry (to less than 18%), then once clear, bottle in champagne bottles and add half a teaspoon of table sugar. Cork and cage. Place somewhere warm for a couple of weeks then remove to storage at the usual temp.

If you're worried you can do small tests in beer bottles and then scale it up (reduce the sugar to reflect the amount of fluid in the bottle, do the sugar and warmth thing and then open it to check the level of carbonation). Increased levels of sugar will increase the carbonation, but also the hazards of over doing it. The test(s) should be incremental - for safety reasons.

And also read up about "methode champenoise" so you know about how its done professionally..........

 

[Medsen Fey]

Welcome to GotMead Varsis!

Can you please tell us the original and final gravity of the batch?

The magic formula is 4 grams/Liter of sugar equates to 1 volume of CO2. Beer carbonation levels are usually in the 1.5-3.0 range, while Champagne gets 4-6 volumes. Meads can be anywhere along that spectrum, but the key is to have the right bottles. You don't want Champagne level pressures in beer bottles because they can explode.

You can use any fermentable sugar - cane sugar, corn sugar, honey (assume 80% of the weight is sugar), or any other fermentables.

I strongly recommend using a good scale and going by weight. Trying to do it by cups or other volume measurements is much less accurate. If you have a fine scale hydrometer, you can figure that 1.5 gravity points translates to 1 volume of CO2.

There are some good threads around if you search "atmospheres" with Oskaar as author, or "volumes of CO2" with me as author that will give you a lot more useful information on carbonating.