Dry Ice??

Now how about this for a first post!! Can you carbonate a keg using dry ice?? Seeing how it is CO2 would this work? I read that it expands something like 800x its dry volume. Anybody ever try this??

Welcome to HBT!

I believe Yuri_Rage did some experiments with this and concluded that it was too dangerous and impractical. If you do a search I'm sure you can find the thread (which has video if I recall correctly).

Edit: Here is the thread.

Short answer: No, it's dangerous.
Long answer: Dry ice expands at a very fast rate, even with a blow off (pressure release) valve, it can be overwhelmed by the expansion and blow up the keg anyway. Dry ice (when it sublimes into CO2) doesn't get absorbed on it's way out of the liquid (bubbling), so it is less efficient than just gassing the beer like normal. If you want to carb in the keg without a CO2 cylinder, prime with sugar like normal (though you might want to use a bit less sugar) and place at room temperature for 2 or so weeks.

I finally found an old thread on it. It had some video too. I definetly will not be using dry ice. That video is insane!! Thanks for the warning

I can't imagine using Dry Ice for carbonating, but it could be used when racking to make sure your secondary is oxygen free - just drop in a chuck before you install the airlock.

Some of us Canucks took a tour of Grand River Brewing on the weekend when we concluded our grain exchange. I noticed they were carbonating using large dewars of liquid CO2 and they were plumbed into their conical fermentors, lagering tanks and bright beer tanks.

Paul

How about for wort chilling? Might wind up with a big mess to clean up, though.