What to do for Wedding

My Fiance and I want to serve only our homebrew at our wedding this fall.

Esp. because whatever we would have budgeted for beer otherwise can go towards whatever ingredients and equipment we need to make it happen.

But we're struggling with how best to transport/serve it.

We're looking at maybe 3-4 batches. We keg at home, and can also bottle, but i'm not sure what will work best. I'm particularly concerned with stirring up sediment during transport to the location, since we cannot store anything there ahead of time.

So here are some options I've thought of. Perhaps y'all can help me figure out the pro's and con's or maybe just what makes sense.

1) Bottle everything - (need a lot more empties than we have)

2) Keg beers, serve on ice like the 'olden days' (college)

3) keg beers and rent/borrow/steal jockey box(s)

4) keg beers, 'keg parka'

In reality we may still bottle some even if we're kegging, but it seems like kegging would be better except i'm worried about yeast/sediment, as we often keg right out of primary and there is a good amount of crud ( but that settles nicely and never comes out of an undisturbed keg once its going)

Our facility doesn't have any serving equipment at all, it's just an event hall. Luckily it's not very far away, but we'd still have to go down one elevator, into a car/truck, drive about 2 miles on city streets, and back up another elevator. We get the event hall 4 hrs before the reception, which may or may not be enough time for re-settling. (when I force carb, I really have to wait overnight, but hopefully we won't be shaking them THAT much)

How soon is the wedding? How long do you leave your beers in primary. Generally I primary 4 weeks and keg. If you rack carefully you should not have a lot of "stuff" to get shaken up. I say go with kegs. Convince each other that parts for a jocky box are in order and build one. Or something like https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/biermunchers-rolling-kegerator-byo-published-71719/

We are getting married in April 2011 and I am thinking about the same thing. Was leaning towards building a keezer and rolling it into a truck with a generator for the ride to the location

depending on mow much time you have. you coudl always do a secondary or even a third fermentation. along with cold crashing each one. that way you have next to nothing in the keg when you transport it. but that would take alot of time.

wedding is in Nov. so there is time to plan. cold crash and xfer could work well, but I have a tendecy to find ways to xfer the crud anyway.

erykmynn said:

..., but I have a tendecy to find ways to xfer the crud anyway.

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I used to do that too. I was listening to a Brew Strong episode and Jamil was describing how he racks. He starts with the inlet of his hose/racking cane/whatever just under the surface and lowers it as it gets lower. That way he can see when he is approaching gunk and stop.

Rack your batches to kegs, cold store and carb until a few days before the wedding, depressurize the kegs, and jumper the full keg to an empty keg, (out coupler to out coupler), turn gas back on at like 2psi and transfer to the fresh keg. purge, gas up to serving pressure again and bring to the wedding site, there will be no sediment in the new kegs to stir up, and it would already be carbed and cold. only issue would be needing one extra keg to transfer into, then clean the old one for the next transfer. or just double up on kegs to make it go quickly.

if your worred about sediment you can sacrafice the bottom 1/2 inch or so of the fermentor. with enough time and planning you should be able to do it that way.

if you could do the filtering method. i know there is a thrad on here that i have read about it.

azscoob said:

Rack your batches to kegs, cold store and carb until a few days before the wedding, depressurize the kegs, and jumper the full keg to an empty keg, (out coupler to out coupler), turn gas back on at like 2psi and transfer to the fresh keg. purge, gas up to serving pressure again and bring to the wedding site, there will be no sediment in the new kegs to stir up, and it would already be carbed and cold. only issue would be needing one extra keg to transfer into, then clean the old one for the next transfer. or just double up on kegs to make it go quickly.

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I agree with this. After a week or two in the keg you can rack off the sediment and not have to worry about it.

If you don't have any extra kegs laying around you can always cold crash and then add gelatin then be very careful while racking to the keg. This gets rid of all my yeast sediment.

Ok, thanks to the copious great suggestions, I feel pretty confident that I can get sediment-free beer into my kegs for transport to the wedding.

But I'm still struggling with the serving setup. Since we occasionally go to events where we might also want a serving setup, I'm extremely torn between the Rolling Kegerator in a trash can idea, and the convenience of a Jockey Box.

Either way, I won't want to tear stuff out of my keezer, so a new stuff is in order. The BM Rolling Kegerator would be probably half the cost of a jockey box setup and 4-5 times the bulk...

Will a jockey box with 50' coils be sufficient to bring room temp beer to serving temp? because the longer coils are very expensive. (and out of curiosity... warm beer?)