Brain Picking time, again.

[GrayingNeophyte]

Hello fellow brewers,
I have been reading about pressurized transfers of beer from fermenters to kegs, using CO2, in order to avoid or minimize exposing the beer to oxygen.
Have any of you started this practice, and if so, does it make noticeable difference in the beer to invest in all the necessary fittings to accomplish such transfer?
In theory, it sounds reasonable, but in practice, it seems to be quite more involved than simply using an auto syphon or plain gravity to perform the transfer.
Any thoughts and advice will be appreciated.
Thank you kindly,

 

[Jwood]

If you already keg, it doesnt take much extra equipment. Love2Brew sells a kit. Real easy, just put the cane through the cap, put the cane in the carboy and put the cap on, attach gas to cap, attach beer line to keg, attach gas QD (venting to atmosphere) to keg so it can vent, turn reguator to lowest you can get it (couple psi max), hit it with a burst of co2 until it starts flowing and then turn off gas (assuming keg is at a lower level than carboy). Then hangout for a while while it slowly transfers.

 

[Jtk78]

I agree with Jwood. The first two kegs I transferred with an auto siphon because that's all I had. I use Fermonsters to ferment in, so I had to get a bit creative, but the set up works great for cold crash suck back, purging during dry hopping or taking hydro samples, as well as transferring. So it solved multiple issues for me. Glad I did it. I did notice some oxidation when bottling, some batches worse than others. I didn't keg enough without this setup to tell if it made a difference.

If you do use an auto siphon, I would recommend going through the beer out post and down the dip tube to minimize splashing when filling the keg.

Here's the thread to my fix with pictures.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/fermonster-back-suck-back-closed-transfer-fix.646893/

 

[BLL]

It seems more involved, but it's cleaner and easier than autosiphons. Like they said above, if you're already kegging then you've probably already got most of what you need and after you have the rest autosiphons will be a thing of the past.