Bottling 500 bottles from kegs

My brewpartner and I are looking to bottle about 45 gallons which are currently sitting in carboys. It'd be great to get rid of sediment, so we have been looking into force carbing in a keg, then bottling from there.

Given the quantity of bottles, what would be the fastest way? I've seen the beer guns, but it seems like they take about 10 seconds per bottle, vs. a 1/2" bottle filler which takes about 4 seconds.

I realize that just kegging and serving from the tap would be a great deal less work, but we want to be able to give them away and take with us easily, and neither of us really have the space for a fridge.

Thanks for any advice.

Just leave the keg carbed and cooled, then fill growlers to take with you or give away.

If you could fill bottles with a Beer Gun at a 15 second cycle, and your buddy could keep up staging the next bottle and capping and casing the filled one, you'd actually fill all the bottles in a bit over two hours.

And it would be epic.

But remember: No pics, didn't happen...

Cheers!

day_trippr said:

If you could fill bottles with a Beer Gun at a 15 second cycle, and your buddy could keep up staging the next bottle and capping and casing the filled one, you'd actually fill all the bottles in a bit over two hours.

And it would be epic.

But remember: No pics, didn't happen...

Cheers!

Click to expand...

+1. do it, do it.

What kind of attachments would I need from a sanke keg for the blichmann?

I'd do growlers but they are expensive, and I want to fill everything up at once.

Can you crank up the pressure on the blichmann to fill faster or will that cause foaming?

Thanks for the help guys. I'll try and get some pictures up once we decide what to do, trying to convince my friend to go for the kegerator/blichmann but we're both pretty strapped on funds.

I've filled bombers with 10 psi with minimal foaming.

But I don't think it would be very easy at all to use the Beergun at room temperature. Maybe my physics knowledge is lacking, but most room temperature beers will be at 30 psi just to maintain carbonation. Trying to use a Beergun at half pressure would be 15 psi. Even with 10 foot long lines, that would be foam city. I don't think the Beergun or any CP bottle filler was designed to work with warm beer at room temperature!

Pretty sure any beer still sitting in carboys is going to be minimally carbonated. From the OP's post I assumed the new beer would be mixed with primer in the keg then beer-gunned into bottles. If true I bet the beer line could be pretty short so the rate of flow could be much higher than normal...

Cheers!

Put the bottles in the freezer, drop the PSI as low as possible and vent the keg before you start and fill them as close to the top as possible then cap on foam.

You are saying you don't have the space for a fridge though which means you would be trying to carb at room temp? It would make more sense to me to just use a bottle bucket, prime then bottle condition if that were the case. I know getting rid of the sediment sounds like a good plan but I don't think you'll have very much luck doing it all at room temp.

I read it as the OP wants to carb it in the keg, and then move the carbed beer to bottles. If you tried to do this with a standard bottle filler it would create for a pretty nasty foam fest. You need the counter pressure portion of the counter pressure filler to get all that co2 into the bottles and sealed successfully.

If you regularly work with volumes like this, you might want to get a couple of 20 gallon fermentation buckets (40 bucks each), rack 3 batches into each (or 4 if you like to live on the wild side), and then bottle from there using priming sugar. In the long run, this would be cheaper than buying a kegging system and 3 sankes if you don't already possess them, and you can use your 1/2" filler to boot!

If you have no space for a freezer/fridge, I think your best option is to simply do it the old fashioned way - siphon to bottling buckets with priming sugar and use a bottle filler. Go get a second bottling bucket and filler and get as many people filling and capping as possible.

Without any kegging equipment, you're talking a ton of money to be able to force carb 45 gallons at once (if you plan on doing it at once). Chest freezer that holds 9 cornies (or 3 sankes), keg fittings, beer gun, co2 tank, regulator, giant manifold/distributor, tubing, clamps, maybe temp controller, etc.

Hey Brew,
Yeah I kind of changed the topic there without being very clear, with the kegging I would have a fridge, found a spot for it.

Looks like we're just going to condition though, too much $$$. What would you guys think about priming in keg, then bottling after 2 weeks? It could be over carbed a bit to compensate for loss during bottling and pressurizing of head space. The only concern I would have about this is oxidation?

Seriously, I would have to say to go ahead and keg-carb it like you previously planned on and then using a fridge go ahead and chill, bottle from, two kegs at a time. If you take the time to Bottle it pre-carbed and clear (no sediment) you will really be glad you took the time to do it. Just pick up a beer gun, and then you'll have it forever, to use over and over.

It really isn't that hard, I bottle 10 gallons at a time on a regular basis, using a Counter Pressure filler, it takes a while to do by myself, but it is worth every minute spent to have a cleard, carbed product in the bottle.

Jonas

jguy898 said:

Seriously, I would have to say to go ahead and keg-carb it like you previously planned on and then using a fridge go ahead and chill, bottle from, two kegs at a time. If you take the time to Bottle it pre-carbed and clear (no sediment) you will really be glad you took the time to do it. Just pick up a beer gun, and then you'll have it forever, to use over and over.

It really isn't that hard, I bottle 10 gallons at a time on a regular basis, using a Counter Pressure filler, it takes a while to do by myself, but it is worth every minute spent to have a cleard, carbed product in the bottle.

Jonas

Click to expand...

Hey Jonas,
I hope that's where we go in the future at some point, but it looks like we're going to condition this batch to save some cash. What would you think about priming the keg, letting it condition for two weeks, then bottling from the keg? Most of the sediment would have settled out, and we could then bottle with a wand or even gravity?

Also, these carboys have been sitting for about 4-5 weeks, do you guys think it would be necessary to add yeast if priming, or is there still enough yeast in suspension? I guess we could also mix the bottom of the carboy up a bit to put some yeast back in the beer?

Don't know if it makes a difference, but the beers are high grav and range from 7-11% (in one of the ten gallon batches we used 35-40 pounds of grain, but forgot to measure the gravity. 20 gallons were 1.090).

Thanks for the advice guys.

About 510 bottles total, took the better part of a day, especially since most of the bottles needed mold cleaned out.

What did you do?

You capped all of them by hand?

Jeez, remind me to never shake your hand. You'd probably rip my arm off by accident.

OMG! You are a beast.

We ended up just bottling with a 1/2" bottling wand from a keggle we used as a bottling bucket (mash tun w/ dip tube), and priming.

They were all capped by hand, honestly the worst part by far was cleaning the bottles that had mold in them.

We picked up a vinator from the brew shop, which made santizing a breeze (but didn't help much with the mold). We'll be storing our bottling upside down from now on...

Thanks for the props guys...