carbonation drops or just sugar?

Mackers · Post by **Mackers** » Thursday Feb 09, 2006 8:14 am

Pricey,

If the stubbies are ok, I reckon you didn't tighten the PET caps up enough. I tighten them up really hard and have never had a problem. I also bottle both PET, long necks and stubbies at the same time and the carbonation doesn't differ. I don't know how long a PET cap will last but mine have had 4 or 5 beers in them and they're still operating perfectly.

Auscol · Post by **Auscol** » Thursday Feb 09, 2006 9:53 am

scblack wrote:I now bulk prime with dextrose, and have no problems.

But back in the day - last year when I kinda started, I used sucrose for priming, and had good results, I certainly could not pick any bad flavours from that. It's such a small amount in the beer, surely it can't make too much difference.

I did two brews with Coopers carb drops, and they were the WORST I have done. They didn't carbonate well at all, and I had definitely used the two drops per longneck. I won't ever use them again.

My biggest problem with the carb drops was fitting them in the bottle neck, dont know if i had a bad batch of drops or what.!

scblack · Post by **scblack** » Thursday Feb 09, 2006 11:22 am

Auscol wrote:
scblack wrote:I now bulk prime with dextrose, and have no problems.

But back in the day - last year when I kinda started, I used sucrose for priming, and had good results, I certainly could not pick any bad flavours from that. It's such a small amount in the beer, surely it can't make too much difference.

I did two brews with Coopers carb drops, and they were the WORST I have done. They didn't carbonate well at all, and I had definitely used the two drops per longneck. I won't ever use them again.

My biggest problem with the carb drops was fitting them in the bottle neck, dont know if i had a bad batch of drops or what.!

Yep, that also happened to me. So you didn't have a bad batch. I had to FORCE many in, and little chunks of sugar went everywhere. Defeated the purpose of an easy method.

pricey · Post by **pricey** » Friday Feb 10, 2006 10:50 pm

Mackers,

You were dead on mate, I opened one of the longnecks that had been racked and fed with carb drops just like all the PET bottles, and the carbonation was great. Dunno how I'm supposed to get the lids on much tighter tho, got a serious blister from putting them on as it was. Think I'm going to move to glass anyway seeing as I dug the old mans bench capper out of the shed for nix

Thanks for the feedback.

JaCk_SpArRoW · Post by **JaCk_SpArRoW** » Saturday Feb 11, 2006 7:18 am

pricey wrote:Mackers,

You were dead on mate, I opened one of the longnecks that had been racked and fed with carb drops just like all the PET bottles, and the carbonation was great. Dunno how I'm supposed to get the lids on much tighter tho, got a serious blister from putting them on as it was. Think I'm going to move to glass anyway seeing as I dug the old mans bench capper out of the shed for nix

Thanks for the feedback.

PET bottles are good for emergencies etc & if ya paranoid about making bottle bombs but I can guarantee once you go glass, you'll never look back....that is of course unless you go to kegs but thats a completely different story for another time!