Substituting Priming sugars with OJ?

[Mandrew]

I was told by a Ciceron acquaintance at a tasting I frequent that I could sub out bottling sugars for orange juice in my holiday ale to give it a citrus kick and just try something new. Has anyone done this/heard of this. I don't live near the guy who mentioned it so I cant reference him, I cant find anything online and my Palmer's "How To" doesn't bring up juice as an appropriate option either. I have just shy of 5 gallons ready to be bottled and am curious. Thanks

[dmtaylor]

Interesting idea. It will work; it's just a matter of figuring out exactly how much juice you'll need to get the right carbonation level. For that, you'll need to be good on a calculator, or give us the specific gravity of the OJ and one of us on the forum might be able to run some calculations for you (e.g., I will do it if I remember to check back here later).

[Mandrew]

After searching THE GOOGLE it appears that the specific gravity of oj is 1.15. What are the calcs necessary to figure this out?

[Afterlab]

The amount of sugar is going to vary slightly from brand to brand and probably from high to low pulp levels. I would think you could see how many grams of sugar are in each serving size for said juice and somehow match that up with how many grams of simple sugar you would use to hit X volumes of CO2. Honestly it seems interesting and worth a try but more work than I would want to do for what might turn out to be barely detectable. I would simplify it by just blending in some OJ before you bottle and add the priming sugar/water mixture like normal. Or instead of blending your priming sugar with water, blend it with OJ and just use a little less sugar.

[Quin]

In theory that would work. The unintended circumstance might be the acidity left over after all the sugars are fermented from the OJ. Think of the fermented orange juice as grapefruit juice. Would you want to add that to your beer to add citrus flavor?

[dmtaylor]

Forgive my train of thought documented below.... my brain works in mysterious ways, but it usually gets to the right endpoint.....

Okay.... I found on 2 sources on Google that the average specific gravity of OJ is 1.0472 or 1.0473, and this sounds more reasonable than the aforementioned 1.15 (or should that have been 1.015? either way it's wrong). Based on that, and knowing that a gallon of water weighs 8.33 lbs, then a gallon of OJ weighs 8.33 * 1.0473 = 8.724 lbs. And so what? Well, out of that 8.724 lbs, you get 47.3 / 4 = 11.8% sugar, so that's 8.724 * 0.118 = 0.969 lbs sugar out of one gallon of OJ.

Also, I know from various sources that one pound of regular white table sugar dissolved in one gallon of water will get a specific gravity of 1.045.

So basically, the two things are interchangeable, namely you can add one pound of sugar per gallon, or one gallon of OJ to get almost exactly the same amount of sugar. Based on that......

I think most people these days are adding about 4 ounces of sugar for a 5 gallon batch of brew. 4 ounces is 0.25 lbs. Therefore, you should be able to add 0.25 gallons of OJ to get approximately the same result. Yep, that's a quart of OJ needed to prime 5 gallons of beer. Actually, my volume measurements are a little bit off. So maybe add a little more than a quart of OJ (maybe 4.25 cups) to make up for my lack of caring to account for the volume of the OJ itself when added to the finished beer. Then again, you said you had a little less than 5 gallons, so maybe it's a wash. Give it a couple weeks to carbonate, and you're good to go as normal.

How's that. Sounds reasonable, right?

Initially I was a little concerned about acidity, but a quart of OJ added to about 5 gallons doesn't seem like such a big deal. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Best of luck to you.

[Mandrew]

Wow, that's great. I appreciate the included math too. I am bottling tonight and will give it a shot. Thanks again.