Hi yall, I am planning on bottling a honey maibock tonight but I have a question pertaining to adding priming sugar. I re racked the maibock onto 1#of honey 2 weeks ago. I know honey has a decent amount of sugar in it but do I need to take that into account for bottling since it was only 1# for 5gls, or can u just go about it normally using northerns calculator? If anyone has experience working with honey in this fashion any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.
All of the fermentable sugar in the honey should be consumed by the yeast by now. You should be able to just prime as per usual. Cheers!
As @JackHorzempa says, all sugar already added has fermented out. Just use a priming sugar calculator as you would normally do. Are you planning on priming with honey as well? I've had great success in the past using honey as my priming sugar and preserving lots of honey character. Just make sure you use an appropriate amount... it doesn't substitute 1:1 with more conventional sugars.
For typical honey, you'll want to use about 1.3 times more (by weight) than you would table sugar. But it wouldn't be a terrible idea to research or measure the sugar content of your honey.
Assuming that the yeast was active and the beer was stored at a suitable fermentation temperature. It would be a good idea to check the gravity and confirm it is at or below what it was before the honey was added. If not, warm it up and wait until it is before bottling.
Would it necessarily be lower? Adding the honey would raise the gravity. If it ferments fully it would still end up higher seeing as how honey isn't 100% fermentable, right? Or would the alcohol bring the gravity below even with the unfermentables? Better practice would be to check stability over a few days like normal.
The sugar in honey is for practical purposes 100% fermentable. And so, as you surmised, it will even lower the gravity, because of the alcohol/water density difference.
Honey can differ somewhat in composition by nectar source, but it does tend to be almost completely fermentable (only around 1.5% by weight is complex sugars). The amount of alcohol added by the fermentation of one pound of honey in 5 gallons will lower the FG by about .002 not counting unfermentables. Stable again only makes sense if you are back at/below the previous FG. If you add the honey to a near-freezing lager it wouldn't be surprising for the gravity to be stable, but cause problems during bottle conditioning. Coincidentally just bottled a five-way split batch of sour-honey ale last night. Primed with an extra ounce of each varietal: sourwood, gallberry, raspberry, blueberry, and acacia. Recipe/notes post.
