Daniel's Review of

Cooper's Carbonation Drops

Carbonating my home brews has always been problematic for me. I've met with some success by force carbonating using a keg and compressed CO2 canister, but it's very expensive and I only have one keg. So, I have to drink everything before I can carbonate the next batch.

Batch priming has always been a spectacular failure for me. For some reason when I add the sugar water to my braggot in the bottling bucket, it never evenly distributes. So a few weeks later, half of the bottles are dead flat, and the other half all explode in a shower of fizz when I open them.

Consequently, I do bottle priming for most of my braggot. I start by dissolving a set amount of plain white sugar in a bit of boiled water then do my best to equally distribute that sugar water among the bottles before siphoning in the braggot from the primary fermentor. This usually works pretty well, but it is very difficult to equally distribute the sugar water.

One solution that I have discovered is to use Cooper's Carbonation Drops. These are premeasured pellets of sugar that you just drop into the bottle before siphoning in your brew. Since I mostly use larger flip-top, Grolsh style bottles, I use two pellets per bottle. I find that the drops require a bit longer than sugar water to fully carbonate, so I usually give them an extra week to work their magic (I guess it takes them a while to dissovle into the brew), but the end result is a more uniform carbonation among my bottles.

I've heard some people complain that carbonation drops can change the flavor, but I wasn't able to detect any difference in taste between a sugar water primed bottle versus a carbonation drop primed bottle of braggot. However, braggot has such a strong flavor that it could simply be overwhelming any differences between the two primings. The only chemical difference that I see is that the drops, while mostly sugar, do have some glucose added.

As for the fizz itself, the sugar water bottle's seemed to be a slight bit finer (smaller bubbles) and had a little bit taller of a head when poured into a glass.