Tag Archives: bottle conditioning

Scotch Ale (Wee Heavy) bottled

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I am very excited to finally have my first Scotch Ale, a “Wee Heavy”, bottled. Recommended aging is two months, longer if possible. I’m hoping to make the two months.

I used Wheat DME for bottling again. I did a couple batches with sugar, and I really wasn’t happy with the carbonation. It really does change it, and I like the tighter head and smaller bubbles of a DME carbonation.

priming-dme

I set up my finished beer (fermented wort?) and propped it up on a board to slant the liquid to the racking cane side.

unracked-beer

Then mixed the priming DME mix and fermented wort in the bottling bucket by racking, and stirred with my wooden mash paddle. I’ve had inconsistent bottle conditioning recently, and stirred the heck out of this batch after adding the priming DME.

bottling-bucket

I finished sterilizing my bottles, and set them all up in a row, and filled them up, assembly line style.

clean-bottles

After bottling was finished, I took the little bit that was left, and put it in a glass to sample. Yummy! Can’t wait to try the bottle conditioned product.

finishing-sample

Bottle conditioning with dried malt extract (DME) instead of corn sugar

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All beer recipes that include using corn sugar for bottle conditioning advise that to bottle condition, you boil 1-2 cups of water, and add the corn sugar and stir until it dissolves. And then other texts that I’ve read advise simply that you can replace the corn sugar with DME if you want to improve the flavor of your beer.

What they don’t tell you, is that if you use DME instead of corn sugar, you shouldn’t just boil and dissolve, you should boil it for at least 15 minutes prior to adding the priming mixture to your beer and then bottling (make sure you don’t have a boilover — watch your pot).

I tried this while doing my most recent batch, and I have to say that I have much more excellent bottle conditioning results after only a few days.

I hope that this helps someone else out who was in the same predicament that I was.

Update: The new conditioning method worked great. Of note, You will need to use more DME for conditioning than corn sugar. I like my beer a little less fizzy than most recepies call for, so I use about .75-1.25 cup of DME per 5 gallon batch, depending on the style.