Root beer from keg to bottle

Right now I'm force carbing 5 gal of root beer in a corny @40 psi and 40*, when the root beers done carbonating can I use a counter pressure bottle filler to put the root beer in bottles? Do I need 30' of bev line to do it? Has anyone ever tried this? Thanks

If you're counter pressure filling, you don't need the extra long line, but it doesn't hurt.

I regularly bottle using a Biermuncher's racking cane and stopper. Kind of a poor man's counter pressure filler:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/we-no-need-no-stinking-beer-gun-24678/

There's really no way to purge or pressurize beforehand, but that's not as critical for soda as it is for beer.

I've got a blichmann beer gun and have been fighting with it for a few batches now. Spoke with them directly and no one that works there has ever tried it on root beer. Their directions say to use their supplied hose and never above 15psi. That threw my normal 30' and 30psi out the window. Their supplied line is like 1/4" and I've brought it down to as low as 2 1/2 psi but still have quite a bit of foam. Tried freezing the bottles first but still have a bunch of foam. I'm using 16oz flip top grolsch bottles so instill get about 12oz in there with the foam overflowing as fast as I can flip the top on. I posted a few posts to see if anyone else has tried the blichmann gun with root beer and had perfect success like I see in every YouTube video with normal beer.

So from someone more who has more experience going from keg to bottle with root beer, what is the best way to go about this?

Basically for a finished soda, there's going to be a lot of foam. It's even worse if there's a juice or some sort of pulp or particulate in your soda. The sugar concentration makes it harder for CO2 to stay in solution, and the pulp and stuff makes great nucleation points for the gas to escape to.

My preferred method is to carbonate water in the keg, then portion flavored syrup into bottles. Slowly fill the bottles with carbonated water under pressure, cap, then shake to mix. This way it's easier to fill the bottles without excessive foaming, and you retain the carbonation lost from mixing.

If you have to fill an already mixed beverage, it's doable, it's just messier. Fill your bottles in the sink, because they will foam over. Sometimes you have to fill as much as you can, and then let the foam dissipate a bit before filling the rest of the way. Fill the bottles gently, instead of having the tip of your filler all the way at the bottom, move it all the way to the top of the bottle and tilt it so the beverage runs down the side. Keep the temperature as low as possible, and turning the pressure down helps, too, as long as you turn it back up again if you're leaving some in the keg after bottling.

I'm going to have to make a video one of these days, because seeing it done helps out quite a lot.

Hey all,
I've been trying to the do the same for years. I tried a Blichmann Beer Gun and a Counter Pressure filler. I tried all possible purge and re-carbonate steps and combinations at all different PSI settings.
I never ever got it to work the way I wanted. I gave up and am migrating my recipes to syrup form. Mr. Food Scientist is absolutely right; they foam up wayyy too much to make mass bottling filling a practical task. I would get a massive head and no carbonation in the body of the soda. I only have to assume that to bottle soda (without yeast) you need high-pressure factory machines.

Kyle

Brewconcepts said:

Hey all,
I've been trying to the do the same for years. I tried a Blichmann Beer Gun and a Counter Pressure filler. I tried all possible purge and re-carbonate steps and combinations at all different PSI settings.
I never ever got it to work the way I wanted. I gave up and am migrating my recipes to syrup form. Mr. Food Scientist is absolutely right; they foam up wayyy too much to make mass bottling filling a practical task. I would get a massive head and no carbonation in the body of the soda. I only have to assume that to bottle soda (without yeast) you need high-pressure factory machines.

Kyle

Click to expand...

Dang, I didn't anticipate any problems. This is disappointing news.

Me too. I wasted two years trying to get this process to work. I should have figured it would be a problem when I couldn't anyone besides Mr. Food Scientist having any success bottling. If I was trying to keg and bottle BEER I would have had the process down much quick; there is a crazy amount of forum support for that.

Hi, what is the size of the Racking Cane Tube to fit with the faucet, 3/8 or 1/2?

I finally got a #2 drilled stopper today to try bottling my Root Beer with the BMBF. I think maybe something isn't right with the set up, as the first bottle started filling OK, but then I got a minor eruption. Bottle ~70% filled.

After that I put the cane into the next bottle, and without opening the picnic tap it started to flow over from 100% foam. I'm guessing something must be wrong with my tap, but before filling the first bottle it wasn't leaking...

Either way, I switched back to my normal method, filling direct from Perlick flow control faucets. As long as everything is cold, I can fill just fine. But it does take a good 30-40 seconds per bottle, and getting the flow just right to have a reasonable fill time with little foam sometimes makes the first bottle only filled to just above the bottom of the neck.

Attached is a picture of a fill I just did on standard 12oz bottle using the Perlick. You can see the foam just below the top bulge. This was with no spilling, I could have probably gone a bit higher and capped on overflow foam, but I don't like to spill.