Soviet

Recipes 

Fellow Brewers:

I've always force-carbonated the beer in my corny kegs. Since I'm such an impatient brewer, and I always want to have beer ready to swap into my 1 (lonely) tap kegerator, would it be a good idea for me to start kegging my pipeline of beer and adding corn sugar to my finished beer (as opposed to just letting it sit in carboys till ready)? Folks that do this—I have some questions for you:

1. Have you noticed any difference in clarity of the beer or flavor— another words, is dissolved CO2 just dissolved CO2?

2. How much corn sugar or table beet sugar do you usually add to the kegged beer if you want to carbonate to say, your average 2.5 volumes vs. 1.5 vs. 4.0 volumes for a belgian?

3. Is any target CO2 volume that cannot be achieved using natural carbonation from yeast eating simple sugar?

4. How long does it take to naturally carbonate a beer inside a 5gal corny keg? I think the last time I tried this it seemed to take forever.

5. Do you get excess sludge in the bottom of the keg when you do this method?

6. What about fining with gelatin? If you do the above method, at what point do you clarify/fine your beer with gelatin or otherwise?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

-Soviet

Yooper

Recipes 

1. No difference
2. I use 1/2 the amount I normally would if I was bottling. So, for most of my American style beers like IPA or APA, I use 2 to 2.5 ounces of corn sugar in 5 gallons of beer in a 5 gallon keg.
3. No.
4. About 2 weeks at room temperature, but maybe longer when it's colder. I did it at 68-70 degrees but not when it was colder than that.
5. No. Not really any more than when you force carb, or at least not noticeably more anyway.
6. Don't know- I won't ever use gelatin or other finings.

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Giving beer a leg to stand on since 2006

Soviet

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Yooper, why don't you/won't you use finings?

Soviet

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I'd love to get others' input as well.

Yooper

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I do use whirlfloc in the kettle, if I remember, but I won't use isinglass or gelatin or the like.

It's mostly because I don't want to have to inquire if someone is a vegetarian before offering them a beer- beer would seem to be vegetarian friendly normally, I'd think. But also because it's simply not needed. My beer is super clear without finings, because of techniques in the kettle and fermenter. It's just not needed. I also don't filter, as I've never needed to.

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Broken Leg Brewery
Giving beer a leg to stand on since 2006

copyright1997

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The only thing I would add to Yooper's post is that I sometimes do this when I want to have some of the batch in the keg and some in bottles. So I:
1. Have the keg sanitized.
2. Get the sterilized sugar solution ready. Since I am going to also bottle, I use the normal to-be-bottled sugar amount.
3. Add the sterilized sugar solution to the empty keg.
4. Rack from the source (primary or secondary or keg - I usually secondary/condition in a keg) into the target keg on top of the sugar solution. This will mix it up nicely.
5. When racking is complete, close the keg, add co2/vent/add co2/vent. Add enough co2 to be able to push beer from the keg to a picnic tap and into your bottling tube.
6. Fill as many bottles as you want. I typically turn the co2 off and then on when pressure gets too low to flow. This way the flow into the bottles is slow.
7. When done with the bottles, add enough co2 to ensure the keg has a good seal. Set it aside at the same place where you are letting your bottles carbonate.

What's nice about this is you can also vent pressure from your keg if you feel it is carbonating at too high of a pressure. One way to tell is using something like this: http://www.williamsbrewing.com/KEG-PRESSURE-TESTER-P715C237.aspx

Note that the above technique isn't the only way to do this. I also sometimes just carbonate the keg with co2 and then fill bottles as needed from the carbonated keg using this technique: http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/we-no-need-no-stinking-beer-gun-24678/. While this works fine, it seems to me to be more work (at least so far in my experience).

What I do depends on whether I want yeast in the bottles/keg and a bunch of other factors, the biggest being my laziness at the moment. (It is SO easy just to carbonate in the keg with co2.)

After you get the keg carbonated, you then can chill it/cold crash it and most of the yeast from the carbonation will fall and you get it out of the keg in the first few glasses you take from the keg.

Hope this helps.

mikeysab

Recipes 

Yoop, why do you use half the amount of priming sugar in the keg? wouldn't you wind up undercarbonated, or does the addition of co2 make up the difference in carbonation?

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Yooper

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Neither!

It has to do with the amount of headspace, actually. In a keg, there is quite a bit of headspace. But not as much that there is in 53 separate bottles!

Because of this, the relative lower amount of headspace in a keg compared to the same volume in separate bottles, you only need 1/2 of the priming sugar that you would in bottles.

I'm no scientist, but it works!

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Broken Leg Brewery
Giving beer a leg to stand on since 2006

mikeysab

Recipes 

is there a chart for volumes when kegging? I have one for bottling, but never saw one for kegging......actually probably just wasn't paying attention, since I was never kegging before.

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Soviet

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Thanks for sharing, all. I just added ~2.0oz of table sugar to my Keg of Russian Imperial Stout. We'll have to crack it open in the late winter and see how it's faring.