Priming with sweet liquors

Why should you use just sugar to carbonate homemade beer?

In order to add new flavours to beer, I tried to prime a fruit ale with a sugar liquor (Cointreau).
First I measured the density of the liquor, and checked the amount of sugar (there’s a bar on densimeter): Cointreau has 105 grams of sugar per liter. As alcohol (40% in volume in the liquor) has lower density than water, I added a 10% of the amout of sugar, to estimate 115 effective grams of sugar per liter.
Then, to carbonate 5 liters of beer I needed 11 grams of sugar, so I added 100ml of liquor. It's easy, you don't need to sterilize priming, as alcohol kills every unwanted microrganism: just measure, add and bottle.
After a month, the priming was perfect, and Cointreau added some nice flavous to the beer (a light lager, in wich I also added mandarines to the worth after primary fermentation)

It was a nice experiment, and there are many more liquors that can be used to prime beer. I actually have a Brown ale primed with Amaretto (200 grams of sugar per liter, very sweet!!). More uptades in one month, just the time to let this Amaretto brown ale to be ready!

in italiano