So I recently brewed a foreign export stout and had the notion to infuse about 10 oz of Kahlua with vanilla bean and coconut and then add it to my beer before bottling. My question is, how do I account for the extra sugar from the Kahlua when bottling so that I don't add too much priming solution?
Since you are adding a significant amount of a product that has sugar in it, why not add it and let it ferment for a short secondary period? The yeast will work on whatever sugars it can, and it will probably re-stabilize in as little as a week.
The nutrition information for the name brand stuff claims 11.2 grams of sugars per ounce. But it is uncertain whether all of that is fermentable.
If you are bottle priming, you will have to allow most of the kahlua to ferment out first if you plan on adding a lot of it so that you don't create bottle bombs. Now if you were to simply add enough Kahlua to bottle prime instead, you would look at the Kahlua label and figure out how much sugar is in the amount you plan on adding. Then just treat that much sugar as "dextrose" in any priming calculator.
Im wondering how much of the coffee flavor would come through at all? Adding all that extra sugar will also thin and dry your beer out - not sure if you wanna do that on your stout or not but something to think about personally I would just think about adding some coffee by itself and not worrying about the sugar at all
So in doing a quick internet search, it appears that kahlua has roughly 15 grams of sugar per fluid oz. That = 150g of sugar in 10oz, or roughly 5.33oz of dextrose. Sounds to me like you could bottle prime with 1/2 of that amount (presuming you are making a 5 gallon batch), or ferment the full amount and use a recipe calculator to figure out how much gravity increase you'd get from 5.33oz of dextrose in your particular batch (that would be about 7 gravity points in a 5 gallon batch I believe).
No, you're probably right about drying out my beer ... I definitely don't want to do that. I think perhaps I'll do what koopa suggested and use it to prime. Thanks for the help everyone.
the one possible glitch I see with this is if any percentage of that is lactose...would be probably more of a concern with bailey's but something to keep in mind.
While that is a VERY good point to consider, I am of the understanding that "Original Kahlua" is coffee beans, vanilla, sugar cane rum, and high fructose corn syrup. They do make a "Kahlua and Cream" version with some dairy additive in it though.
One mistake I did make though was my 7 gravity point guesstimate, as it would only be 3 points actually.
