Seocndary Fermentation in a keg

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MadHopper

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I will be receiving my kegging equipments from Kegconnections.com sometime this week and am really excited about the switch from bottling (I have brewed and bottled 5 batches so far and can't take the bottling step anymore :eek:) . This may be the first of many questions I will have about kegging (although the search feature has been a good friend so far).

So currently I have a Dunkelweizen in the primary and almost ready to transfer to the secondary. I was wondering, if instead of racking it twice, I can simply rack it to the keg once, let it sit around 60-65F for a week or so and then force carbonate it.

Any drawbacks to this?

The only one I can think of is that I usually use some clarifier (gelatin) when the rack to the secondary. If I do this in the keg, there'll be no way of removing the muck at the bottom. However, given that the Dunkelweizen is dark and should have yeast floating around anyway, doesn't make much sense to use a clarifier anyway.

Any thoughts, suggestions are appreciated.
 
wheat beers are not cloudy because of yeast. they are cloudy because of the wheat. the first few pints are going to be real yeasty. you can compensate by cutting the last few inches off the liquid out dip tube. the problem with this is you will be leaving some beer behind if you ever go back to not using the keg as a secondary.
 
No problem, I'd give it the usual 3-4 weeks so all of the particles can drop out. If you used a hefeweizen yeast, it should stay in suspension in the keg. Most of my batches, the first pint or two out of the keg will be murky, but I put that in a 1L PET and let it settle.

Cutting 1/2" off the pickup tube will avoid the problem, but I don't bother.
 
That will work just fine.
Transfer to the corny and let it sit for as long as you want to without disturbing it. Then make a, "Out to Out" QD hose (2 black QD's) and transfer the beer from the secondary corny to the serving corny with about 2 or 3 PSI of CO2. When it's just about done, be ready to pull the QD from the serving keg. When it starts to gurgle pull the QD. If you get the timing right, you'll get very little sediment transfer to the serving keg.

I get crystal clear beer with this method, and no fining agents at all.
 

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