Can I keg bottled beer?

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jacksonbrown

jacksonbrown

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I have a Red that's been in the bottles for coming up on 4 weeks. There is no sign of carbonation (it's been sitting at 65-68 degrees). I'd like to excersize some patience and wait it out another week, but if there is still nothing fizzing by then, is it ok to pour what I have into a keg and force carb it? I'd imagine there is some risk of contamination, but aside from there is there any reason this is not a good idea? Thanks!
 
Contamination wouldn't be an issue (you'd sanitize the keg), but oxidation would be a huge issue. Opening and pouring would aerate the heck out of it.

You could try opening each bottle and adding a pinch of yeast (like one grain) if you think that's the issue. I assume it was primed in the usual way, with priming sugar?
 
Somewhere around here, there's a thread a lot like this one. Oxidation will certainly be your primary concern, but a few HBT'ers claim success with kegging bottled beer. I don't recall that they took any huge precautions - they just carefully poured the bottled beer into their kegs.
 
I think if I was going to attempt this, I would open the bottles and pour them slowly in a bottling bucket, making sure I held them as close to the bottom or top of the surface of the liquid as possible, then I would run a tube from the spigot to the bottom of the keg and fill the keg.
 
Definitely primed with dextrose as normal. I really don't want to bother with more yeast, so I will try the bottle-bucket-keg method. The Red is one of the beers being given to my Groomsmen as gifts, so it'd be nice if it wasn't flat. Thanks for the tips.
 
sounds like time is of the essence!! It seems a lot of homebrewers incorporate their hobby into their wedding. I am planning on putting a few bottles with a fancy label on each table as party favors.
 
i have done this before with no ill effects. I basically just took a beer pitcher i had handy and emptied the flat bottles into the pitcher as easy as possible. Then i poured it into the keg by the pitcher in an attempt to reduce the number of times i was "sloshing" beer into the keg.

Worked fine for me.
 

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