PSA of the Day: Leave Headspace when Draft Bottling, You Dirt Monkeys!

I've been using the BMBF to draft bottle for awhile now. Works fine, but I tend to lose a good amount of carbonation if I leave headspace. So I do my best to fill them entirely up. Never had a problem with this before.

Cut to Friday. I had a keg of 12.5% Briti-Belgian barleywine. While it's been on 10-12psi for awhile now, it still didn't have a huge amount of carbonation. Now, normally, when draft bottling, I get some foam, which forces me to leave a tiny bit of headspace. This time, because of my flow gates and the low carbo level in the beer, I ended up filling up to the lip, all the way.

The next morning, 4 bottles had kasploded. 2 have blown up since. Elementary f*cking physics, yo! Leave no headspace on a carbonated beverage, bottled cold, then let it warm up? What do you think is gonna happen? Live and learn, I suppose. I'm going to carefully put the rest of the bottles in the fridge, uncap them one by one, bleed a little beer off each one, then recap. Better to have undercarbed beer than live grenades.

Oh, and I'm dropping some scrilla on a beer gun today, too.

Anyway, the more you know...

Welcome to the club, The Beer Gun Club.

I still use the BMBF for the occasional fill, but the BG rocks when bottling more than a few from the same keg and rocks big when bottling two cases. With two people, you can knock it out in no time and you leave the perfect amount of head space each time.

Damn. Got the beer gun, but my LHBS was out of the accessory kits. I got an adapter at lowes to hook up the gas line, but the liquid line they give you with the gun is too small to fit over a typical barb fitting on the liquid disconnects. I'm assuming that they want you to use the small diameter liquid tubing that it comes with to minimize foaming, but what if I already have flow gates? Couldn't I just hook up my regular liquid tubing to the beer gun with a worm clamp?

EDIT: nevermind. That tubing just needed some massaging to get it on the barb of one of my liquid discons. Ready to roll!!!

Hey, do I need to do anything to sanitize the beer gun?

EDIT: nevermind again. Reading directions helps

For tubing problems, I microwave a cup of water to boiling, then put the end of the hose in it for a few minutes to soften it up. Works almost every time.

Have a corny with starsan in it and use that to sanitize the line and I spray the outside.

EdWort said:

For tubing problems, I microwave a cup of water to boiling, then put the end of the hose in it for a few minutes to soften it up. Works almost every time.

Have a corny with starsan in it and use that to sanitize the line and I spray the outside.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I just warmed it up, slid on okay.

Read the directions, it said to disassemble the gun, soak in detergent, rinse, sanitize, reassemble. So that's what I just did. Now I'm ready to get some Flanders Red bottled...woot!