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Hey folks,

New to all-grain brewing (w/Grainfather). We brewed an imperial stout on Saturday, but forgot to pick up any bottling sugar. I've been reading about the use of champagne yeast in beer, and like the idea of adding a dry character to the final product. I'm curious - can champagne yeast be used to carbonate the bottled beer, or is this simply a recipe for bottle bombs? If we do use the champagne yeast, would we still need to add bottling sugar after the yeast completes its meal?

Thanks for any insight or guidance.

Never used champagne yeast for bottling, but my gut would say no. It can tolerate very high alcohol so would make for unpredictable results. If you added priming sugar you could end up with bottle bombs as would likely ferment it and residual sugar as well. I had a mead that went from 1.105 starting gravity to 0.994 using champagne yeast... Over 15%. Once you get it going... It will chew up a lot! I usually bottle condition with Lallamand CBC-1. Neutral flavour, fairly alcohol tolerant of high abv beer and floccs well.

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Hobbitfu wrote:I usually bottle condition with Lallamand CBC-1. Neutral flavour, fairly alcohol tolerant of high abv beer and flocks well.

Thanks, will look into this!

Champagne yeast doesn't ferment the bigger sugars well. So for an all malt beer that beer yeast has already fermented, the champagne yeast won't do too much. All of the leftover sugars will be long and or branched. If you add priming sugar it will chew through the sucrose or glucose (depending on whether you add table sugar or the corn sugar) but that is about all. That said, unless you age your beer a long time your won't need to add extra yeast. There should be plenty of yeast still in suspension to bottle condition.

I only add extra yeast at bottling if like you said I age for extended time. Or sometimes when I have really high abv beers or need a quick turnaround. Good point in champagne yeast and malt sugars, didn't think about that.

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