If you bottle your homebrew, a great way to add fruit flavor to the final product is to use fruit juice in place of priming sugar. You can bottle condition and carbonate almost anything as long as you have yeast and some type of sugar. Fruit juice is loaded with good sugars, and creates great flavors in finished carbonated product. You just need to know how much juice to add for the correct carbonation levels. 

The following information assumes that your beverage is at terminal gravity. If there is more fermentable sugar in solution, in addition to the fruit juice you are adding, there is a higher risk for over carbonation and bottle bombs. 

If you use pasteurized fruit juice (without preservatives) from the store, the nutritional facts on the container will tell you how much sugar there is. I am holding a glass bottle of Lakewood Pure Pineapple juice found at Rouses. The label says there are 25 grams of sugar per 8 fluid oz serving size. 

  • We normally use 5 oz of priming sugar for 5 gallons of beer, which is 141.75 grams. So we need 141.75 grams of sugar from the juice. 
  • Divide the amount sugar you need, 141.75 grams, by the amount of sugar in 1 serving, 25 grams… 141.75g ÷ 25g = 5.67, this is the number of servings of juice we need. 
  • Multiple the amount of servings needed, 5.67, by the quantity of 1 serving, 8 fluid oz… 5.67 x 8 fluid oz = 45.36 fluid oz. We need 45.36 fluid oz of this pineapple juice to carbonate our beverage.  

Let’s say you have fresh fruit. You’ve just juiced your Ponchatoula strawberries, but there’s no nutritional facts, so how do you know how many grams of sugar are in solution? Take a gravity reading! For example, you put your hydrometer in your fresh juice and see it floating at 1.030 SG (this is just an example!) 

  • We need to know how many grams of sugar that 1.030 SG equates to in order make sense of this… SG ÷ 10 = grams of sugar per milliliter. Or simply move the decimal place… 1.030 SG reading means we have 0.1030 grams of sugar per milliliter.
  • We normally use 5 oz of priming sugar for 5 gallons of beer, which is 141.75 grams. So we need 141.75 grams of sugar from the juice.
  • Divide the amount of sugar you need, 141.75 grams, by the amount of sugar found in 1mL, 0.103 grams…
    141.75 ÷ 0.1030 = 1,376.213592233 mL
  • Divide that number by 1000 to convert to liters, 1.376 liters, or ask google to convert it to fluid oz = ~46.5 fluid oz. We need 46.5 fluid oz of strawberry juice to carbonate our beverage.