Using Sugar Cubes To Prime

This is a quick little trick for bottle carbonation. The usual method is to mix priming sugar with water, boil it, cool it, then gently mix it into the entire batch of beer. This takes time and there’s no guarantee that you’re getting the same amount of sugar into each bottle. Behold, the humble sugar cube.

Cost-wise I think this is really close to buying priming sugar in a pre-measured 5oz bag. So you’re gaining time and convenience but not hurting your budget. You might see some cost savings if you’re buying priming sugar in bulk, though. I used Amazon with free shipping to factor costs.

You need to make sure you get a package of sugar cubes that contains 2.5 gram sized cubes. You’ll use 1 cube in each 12oz beer bottle. If you are using 22oz beer bottles then you would add 2 cubes. Unfortunately, I can’t offer any recommendations for other bottle sizes. I’ll add to this if I come across someone mentioning other bottle sizes or if I try some out myself.

Cut to the chase.

Just fill the bottle with delicious beer, drop in the appropriate number of cubes, and cap. Easy peasy.

But what about all that sanitizing stuff??

I haven’t seen yet where someone said they had bottle bombs after using this method. I’d suggest keeping the packages of sugar cubes in a sealed plastic bag until you use them. Some say they handle the cubes with gloves on, some don’t.