brewmaster's Profile

@scienceandthecity

It is not recommended to measure the volume of priming sugar ever, you should weigh its mass always. (To do it properly you also need to account for the temperature of the beer as residual CO2 is dissolved after fermentation.)

The reason you use less table sugar (a.k.a. sucrose) by weight than corn sugar (a.k.a. dextrose a.k.a. glucose) is that it weighs less than 2 x corn sugar.

Sucrose is C12H22O11 = FW 342

Corn sugar comes in two forms, anhydrous (no water) and monohydrate (one water molecule), so either

anhydrous glucose C6H12O6 = FW 180
or
glucose monhydrate C6H12O6 H2O = FW 198

All three forms of sugar are completely fermentable, so
either of the glucoses will produce two CO2 molecules while sucrose will produce four CO2 molecules during fermentation. Sucrose however is less than half the weight of anhydrous glucose while the monohydrate is the heaviest of them all (must use more weight to get the same CO2).

Check out the BYO carbonation chart linked above to see that 170 grams of anhydrous would produce 2.24 volumes of CO2, monohydrate would produce 2.04, while sucrose would produce 2.36. 0.3 volumes won't make or break a beer, but it is something that the homebrewer can control with practice over time.

PS - the wort chiller is a great recommendation, an IC is a great investment for the increase in beer quality.

Also meant to say that using regular sugar to prime will not make your beer taste like cider. If too much simple sugar is the cause of cidery flavors in your beer it would come from using too much cane or corn sugar as a substitute for wort when your produced it for the main fermentation (not the refermentation in the bottle for carbonation). Although other common causes of this off flavor are fermenting too warm, aceto bacteria contamination or just straight up acetalaldehyde which is an intermediate fermentation product. Acetalaldehyde has a "green apple" flavor and would likely indicate that your fermentation was not complete when you bottled (the yeast continue to clean up fermenation byproducts even after the gravity has fully dropped from primary fermentation). In that case age can sometimes clean up the cidery flavors.