Dosing Beer ?!?..better yet, share a beer with your tank.

aurora

aurora

New member
I'm a brew man myself and has been periodically dosing my tank with...beer.

I started dosing alcohol to my tank about a year ago to combat a mild high nutrient issue in my tank. I don't do it consistently but about once every 1-2 weeks when I see any hint of increased nutrients...you know...algea on the front glass accumulating faster than normal or maybe a hint of cyanobacteria in the corner. I also have a 10g planted aquarium for the kids and use sugar and yeast method to provide carbon to my fresh water planted aquarium. When the sugar is spent, I save the by-product which is mostly alcohol and use that to dose my reef. Probably like most of you, I usually enjoy viewing my tank with a beer in the evening when I have the chance. Well, a few months back, I did not finish a beer and it went flat by the time I found it. Instead of wasting the beer, I dumped about 1/2 a bottle into the tank. Now, whenever I'm enjoying my tank with a brew in my hand, I give the tank a swig from my bottle. This works out to be about 3-4 times a week and I've since stop dosing my sugar/yeast byproduct.

It is not often we find something that we enjoy doing that is also beneficial to our tank. Therefore, I just want to share my wonderful discovery to my fellow reefer. Instead of dosing vodka/sugar/vinegar like you're currently doing, why not share a beer with your tank. I don't recommend this to everyone, especially if you don't know your tank well, has less than 120g, or don't have good skimmer. BTW, my tank is doing great and my SPS is growing faster than I can frag them.
 
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Dosing Beer ?!?..better yet, share a beer with your tank.

I've heard of vodca but beer?


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Interesting...
I once started a thread, worried about spilling a beer in my sump. I dumped more than 1/2 of a Bud Light into the sump on accident, and to tell you the truth, my tank did not even notice... PE was normal, fish and inverts normal, really everything as normal accept my skimmer, it was rocking. I was overskimming a small nanotank, so it pretty much did it's job... Interesting idea, will be keeping a close eye on this thread...:)
 
If you think about it, the alcohol in beer is not any different from the alcohol in vodka. It's just that beer has other stuffs in it. Vodka is essentially alcohol and water with very little of anything else and that's why it's desirable as pure carbon source. When you are dosing Vodka/Vinegar/Sugar, you are essentially providing a carbon/nutrient source for a bacterial bloom in your tank. This bacterial bloom biologically depletes free nitrate and phosphates from your tank water and is skimmed out of your tank water by your skimmer. That is why you need a very good skimmer for this to work.

I only used to dose carbon sporadically as needed before because I'm lazy but since finding out that beer works essentially the same way without any problem, I've became a regular doser out of convenience. Every couple of days or so, as I walk by the tank with a beer in my hand, I give the tank a sip from what I'm drinking. I really don't measure it out but I'd say the tank get 1/8 of my beer each time and our relationship just gets better and better. Again, I don't recommend this for a small system. I have about 400g total so I have a lot of room to play with here. On top of that, I now have a use for those unfinished or warm beer that used to go down the drain.
 
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aurora said:
On top of that, I now have a use for those unfinished or warm beer that used to go down the drain.
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Rule #1: Finish your beer! ;) Interesting concept... can't say I'm brave enough to try it though! What type(s) of SPS do you keep? Pics?
 
On some of the italian forums I have heard of them dosing yeast also so might not be as bad as it sounds
 
Beer contains carbohydrates. The yeast has been used up and filtered out in the fermentation process almost completely in what you and I chug out of a bottle. Carbohydrates are converted into simple sugars by our bodies to be used as energy or excess fat once the daily amount exceeds your metabolic injestion/use of them. These sugars are used by the body at the cellular level so that cells can function. The excess is stored in the form of fat in your adipose cells.

So therefore, Beer containing carbohydrate is a carbon source. The percentage of alcohol in comparison is low, but would get used by the bacterias that like in kind feed on vodka. Or simply put it would sound like dosing VSV, with more sugars in the recipe, less vodka, and no vinegar.

The hitch I find is, what unlike our bodies is breaking down or converting the more complex chain carbohydrates into sugar?

Is this part happening at all? Is the bacteria able to do this?

Do the more complex carbon chains instead get used by corals who would expell byproduct that would then be used by bacterias?

There's where I wonder what's going on?

But then again, I tend to ponder way too much.
 
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Just sounds like alcohol abuse to me.

If you're serious about this though, it probably depends on what kind of beer you're talking about too. If it's Bud Light, it's mostly just alcohol and water. But other beers with heavier gravity would be different. I would wager that highly hopped beers like IPAs or anything with significant hop acids could do some very unexpected things in a tank. Hops are known for antimicrobial characteristics too, which is something I certainly wouldn't want in my reef.

Although you might have good luck using hoppy beer to treat ich... Just kidding. :)
 
aurora said:
I'm a brew man myself and has been periodically dosing my tank with...beer.

I started dosing alcohol to my tank about a year ago to combat a mild high nutrient issue in my tank. I don't do it consistently but about once every 1-2 weeks when I see any hint of increased nutrients...you know...algea on the front glass accumulating faster than normal or maybe a hint of cyanobacteria in the corner. I also have a 10g planted aquarium for the kids and use sugar and yeast method to provide carbon to my fresh water planted aquarium. When the sugar is spent, I save the by-product which is mostly alcohol and use that to dose my reef. Probably like most of you, I usually enjoy viewing my tank with a beer in the evening when I have the chance. Well, a few months back, I did not finish a beer and it went flat by the time I found it. Instead of wasting the beer, I dumped about 1/2 a bottle into the tank. Now, whenever I'm enjoying my tank with a brew in my hand, I give the tank a swig from my bottle. This works out to be about 3-4 times a week and I've since stop dosing my sugar/yeast byproduct.

It is not often we find something that we enjoy doing that is also beneficial to our tank. Therefore, I just want to share my wonderful discovery to my fellow reefer. Instead of dosing vodka/sugar/vinegar like you're currently doing, why not share a beer with your tank. I don't recommend this to everyone, especially if you don't know your tank well, has less than 120g, or don't have good skimmer. BTW, my tank is doing great and my SPS is growing faster than I can frag them.
Click to expand...

are you drunk? :spin1::beer::spin2::hmm4:
 
SaltwaterAdict said:
Damn Yank u a chemist or something! lol I lost u after the first couple sentences...
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Not a chemist.

I was a chem, biology, physics buff in jr and sr high.

I've always been into anything science and I know just about enough to be able to have a conversation with folks who are in those fields. And more importantly in conversational sense to know when the ramp is leading towards things beyond me, ;) .
 
I'm not to keen on the idea of putting beer in my reeftank for experimentation purposes. I understand the idea of adding alcohol as a carbon source, however beer isn't pure alcohol and has other ingredients that we just don't know what effects they have on livestock.

On the other hand, I was cringing after adding vodka the first time for nutrient export and icemelt to my tank the first time for CA & Mg dosing. This was obviously after there was experience with it on this board though.

So, for the fact that you have the stones to do it first, I give you a :thumbsup:. However, I feel that the way you seem to be going about it doesn't have enough scientific evidence to really warrant any benefit other than "my tank didn't crash, so I kept doing it." Now if you were measuring quantities of beer added and testing parameters after a baseline was determined, then we'd have something to go by.
Just my 2 pennies.
 
I dont poor beer into my tank often, but when I do...... I make it a Dos Equis! ha-ha, cheers to you my friend! Can we get some pics of the drunk tank? Sounds like an intersting concept.
 
I wouldn't do it personally for a number of reasons...

I have heard a story about a complete tank wipe-out caused by a drunk kid pouring an entire beer into his friend's display tank. Don't know if that's true either, but...
 
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I tried 151 bacardi instead of vodka mistake It made my Anemones mad and didnt really help anything out exept for making a mess when skimmers all flooded the place hours later. I am not trying anything else like this Made my triggers drunk and they bite hard LOL
 
Litter Box said:
I'm not to keen on the idea of putting beer in my reeftank for experimentation purposes. I understand the idea of adding alcohol as a carbon source, however beer isn't pure alcohol and has other ingredients that we just don't know what effects they have on livestock.

On the other hand, I was cringing after adding vodka the first time for nutrient export and icemelt to my tank the first time for CA & Mg dosing. This was obviously after there was experience with it on this board though.

So, for the fact that you have the stones to do it first, I give you a :thumbsup:. However, I feel that the way you seem to be going about it doesn't have enough scientific evidence to really warrant any benefit other than "my tank didn't crash, so I kept doing it." Now if you were measuring quantities of beer added and testing parameters after a baseline was determined, then we'd have something to go by.
Just my 2 pennies.
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Well...you have a right to your 2 pennies. However, most of the stuff that are posted on these boards are anectodal and not scientifically proven anyhow. Who has time to do a truly scientific study using controls and blinds anyway? When I first entered this hobby more than 10 years ago, it is the collective OBSERVATIONS of hobbyists on these boards that helped me became successful. Some observations makes sense and others don't but it is the collective body of observations that in the end wins out. However, someone has to make the first observation and mine is "beer is likely safe and can probably be used instead of whatever carbon you are dosing". If you happen to be a beer drinker, this may work for you since it's readily available and most of the time you are looking at your tank with a beer in your hand. Give your tank a swig and VOILA...instant maintenance. It doesn't get better than that. It is rare that I can say I truly enjoy the maintenance part of this hobby.

This reminds me of another observation I posted several years ago. When I first set up my 300g system, I had a faulty pH meter and ended up dosing too much Kalk...massive snowstorm. I came home from work to find the tank looking like someone had poured milk in it and the livestocks looking really stressed or dying. My alkalinity was like 2 and Ca was 200. Since my system volume was about 400g and I only have about 30g of ro/di water on hand, I did about 150g water change using dechlorinated tap water. Ca got up to about 280. All the LFS were closed and in desperation, I remembered that 2pt calcium up is essentially CaCl and that is the same thing used in some snow melt. I picked up a bag of Dow Flakes from a local Homedepot and used that to bump up my system Ca. It took about 4-5 quarts of flakes to get my system back to a Ca of 400. All my corals, including some good size SPS colonies survived and I only lost one angelfish and 3 cleaner shrimprs. I felt what I did saved my tank and I posted my experience on the RC Chemistry Forum and man did people flamed me including Dr Holmes-Farly about using unproven chemicals in my reef. There was a lot of discussion and a bunch of people chimed in on the thread. A few months later, Dr Holmes-Farly published the recommendation for his homemade 2-part soln after doing some analysis using...you guessed it...Dow Flakes. It's now almost 10 years later and no one questions the safety of using Dow Flakes, Mag Flakes and Baking Soda.

I wonder if someone with access can pull up a thread that old....

BTW...I drink Heineken and Corona.
 
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