cask conditioning

i decided to condition my ipa in one of my cory kegs. its my first time doing this and i was wondering if there are any tips on it? the beer has already been in a primary for 7 days and in the secondary for about three days. (i had to pull it to use the carboy for my next brews fermentation. i lost a carboy yesterday. RIP carboy) my OG was 1.062 and my reading yesterday was 1.012, so fermentation is almost done if not already. hopefully this will work out alright.

this pdf from northern brewer has some tips on cask conditioning (p 2, Real Ale)

By cask conditioning do you mean that the beer will be a cask ale and served from a beer engine? If you plan on carbing the beer up with priming sugar or bottled CO2 than you are simply using the corny as a secondary which is very common and what I and many people prefer to do. If I'm reading your post wrong I apologize.

i aparantly misunderstood what cask conditioning meant. i am actually just using a keg as a secondary fermenter. still some tips would be helpful! thanks for clearing that up monkey

quadbikerjosh said:

i aparantly misunderstood what cask conditioning meant. i am actually just using a keg as a secondary fermenter. still some tips would be helpful! thanks for clearing that up monkey

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Actually, unless you've added more sugars for the yeast to munch on when you racked into the keg, you're using it either for aging or as a bright tank...

I've started using kegs for primaries as well as for aging. They make a great option for both for several reasons...

I suggest you read up on the threads about using long primaries and no secondary racking. Lots of good info with first hand experiences... Personally, I only rack to another vessel for aging or adding additional flavor elements where I want/need to get off of a previous element/item... Makes for much easier processes, and results in great brew...

As Golddiggie mentioned, there are a lot of people that use primaries only and then bottle or keg. Most will use a secondary for dry hopping or fruit additions or to free up their primary like you did.

To use it as a secondary is rather straight forward. It's a good idea to purge the keg with some CO2 before you rack the beer into it. Then rack the beer trying to minimize splashing and oxidation. Once it's in put the lid on, purge the head space with CO2 and pressurize the keg to ~30psi to seal all the gaskets. At that point you can let it age like a secondary/bright tank. Once it is at a taste you like you have two options; 1. cold crash it and transfer to another keg to leave behind the sediment and then begin carbing. 2. Put it in the fridge, chill it, carb it and dispose of the first few pints which will have some sediment.