Downside to draft beer at home

[Grossy]

As for kegging vs bottling.

50 bottles to wash vs one.

Cleaning a keg: Night before, fill keg and add PBW. Next morning, rinse and fill with beer, hook up C02.

Cleaning lines: Hook beer line up to hot water faucet. 1 minute rinse. Replace lines once a year.

It cant get much easier than that.

 

[lump42]

I bottle because lack of space and more importantly I'm working dialing in my fermentation before other projects.

Honestly, no one has even touched on what I consider the main advantage of kegging (or, at least, the main reason I switched): being able to manipulate the carbonation level. Since kegging, I've never had to suffer through 5 gallons of undercarbed beer, nor have I had a single bottle explode on me. If I'm in a hurry, I can be drinking cold, carbonated beer a day or two after cold-crashing. I got tired of raising the church key to the bottle cap and crossing my fingers for the "Psssht!", then exhaling a sigh of relief when I got confirmation. I got equally tired of the disappointment of waiting 6 weeks for a batch of beer, only to discover the priming sugar didn't mix evenly, or I didn't use enough, or some of the caps weren't sealed tightly, or whatever.

As far as undercarbed beer, I always bottle in at least one 12oz plastic soda bottle that way I can check on carbonation progress and clarity. So far, I haven't been in a hurry, I've had at least one or two 5 gal batches bottle conditioning. Although that may change with an impending house move. Stupid realtor told us we shouldn't have carboys and buckets siting in buckets of water around the house.

 

[bbohanon]

Having kegged beer around is nice..sometimes too convienent. I usually bottle up at least one of the 2 kegs from my batches to give to friends and co-workers. Keeps me from having too much on tap at one time and keeps the pipeline need there so I can keep brewing.

As long as the love of brewing is greater than the need to drink it all quickly, you should be ok. Otherwise the drinking could be leading to larger problems..

 

[bbohanon]

Here's one more of the many upsides to kegging your own beer.

Your wife can't count the number of empty beer bottles.

5 beers: you get the "look".
6 beers: you get "haven't you had enough".
7 beers: you get a "look" and a "really?"
8 beers: she starts talking about how "you have to work tomorrow".

1 keg, 1 glass, and as many beers as I want = Marital Bliss

I have to say, this is 100% accurate. I hate that "look" from the wife when the bottles pile up on a hot sunny saturday. With a single glass and a tap, heading outside to do some "work" I can refill as much as I want. When she asks how many I have had, I usually hit the low side like 1 or 2. She does not need to know I am on refill 5-6+. No more "look".

 

[slym2none]

Well that's the thing... the bottlers are acting like the keggers can't bottle.

Not all of us!

 

[Natdavis777]

Here's one more of the many upsides to kegging your own beer.

Your wife can't count the number of empty beer bottles.

5 beers: you get the "look".
6 beers: you get "haven't you had enough".
7 beers: you get a "look" and a "really?"
8 beers: she starts talking about how "you have to work tomorrow".

1 keg, 1 glass, and as many beers as I want = Marital Bliss

Hit the nail on the head. My wife used to do the whole, "really, how many more do you need to have?"... She has since ceased her comments or looks, but man, this was totally her about 2 years ago.

 

[Konadog]

Here's one more of the many upsides to kegging your own beer.

Your wife can't count the number of empty beer bottles.

5 beers: you get the "look".
6 beers: you get "haven't you had enough".
7 beers: you get a "look" and a "really?"
8 beers: she starts talking about how "you have to work tomorrow".

1 keg, 1 glass, and as many beers as I want = Marital Bliss

For me, it's totally the opposite. I can regulate just fine, but I may give my wife the "look" after about 7 beers. There's a reason one of my brews is called "wife screamer!" :cross:

 

[njviking]

You clean your lines? Lol.

I'm in the same camp. In 20 years i thinkI have cleaned my lines maybe twice or three times. I do change them once a year but I have a constant supply of 4 different beers on my lines.

I both bottle and keg; but my brewing buddies and I also do 20gal batches.

It might be somewhat the same timewise with 5/6 gal batches. Bump it up to 20 and tell me the same story?

Not throwing gas on the fire but as the saying goes.......... your mileage may vary, and my beer trucks are pigs....

 

[Natdavis777]

When a keg kicks, I grab an empty keg (well one with sanitizer in it) and run it through that line. It has served me well so far.

 

[erick0619]

I kill kegs in a week to 2.5 weeks, max.

It's gotten pretty bad. I had to get a 20 gal kettle so I can actually start building up a pipeline.

Oh the struggle!!!!!!!

 

[Transamguy77]

I don't see a downside to draft beer, anytime I have a beer I only have 1 (well as long as your glass is never emptied before I fill it its still 1). No bottles to wash and only 1 beer at a time, sounds like a win win to me.

 

[beernutz]

I'd like to see video footage of going from dirty keg to filled and carbing keg in 20min or less. That's all I'm saying.

Two words that will change your life: keg washer.

20 minutes to clean a keg, sanitize the auto-siphon, and fill a keg?
Piece of cake.

 

[shortyz]

Here's one more of the many upsides to kegging your own beer.

Your wife can't count the number of empty beer bottles.

5 beers: you get the "look".
6 beers: you get "haven't you had enough".
7 beers: you get a "look" and a "really?"
8 beers: she starts talking about how "you have to work tomorrow".

1 keg, 1 glass, and as many beers as I want = Marital Bliss

hhahahah this is spot on. But on the other hand are we we just in denial of being partial alchoholics? We love our brews but in all reality we crave the side effects of it, you cannot deny that.

But yea kegging is great, i will never go back. plus i can fill a swing top and throw it in my backpack.

 

[madscientist451]

Yeah, bottling is a pain in the butt, I'm still doing it though.
I think I would drink more with a cold keg available. I drink 2-3 a night and that's enough, maybe too much, I'm thinking I need to cut back.
I also usually drink a different beer each time, and usually have 7-10 different beers to choose from.
If I had the cash, I'd put in a walk in cooler and have 6 or 8 taps.

 

[Cheesy_Goodness]

Disclosure: Bottler looking into kegging

Drinking too much because its convenient to get to is a concern I guess, but if that's a possibility I'd say its probably a bad idea to be homebrewing in the first place.

Having said that, if you're like most homebrewers who just like enjoying great beer and consider the alcohol a bonus (or a non starter), the time savings is a big deal.

 

[Psylocide]

Another big advantage that keggers have over bottlers is that we have the ability to can our beer.

 

[Takuie]

Those that say they don't have room to keg, that's just an excuse. It takes far more less room to house a 5 gallon keg AND the equipment to clean/maintain. You don't need a giant keezer. If you have room for 50 bottles, you have room for 1 5 gal keg.

My biggest gripe with bottling was the washing of all the bottles and life threats to friends to bring those bottles back. Starting with a dirty keg, takes me about 20-30 minutes to clean, rack then toss in fridge. Plus, when you convert over to keg, your bottling bucket can now be used as an additional fermenter. Bottling from a keg is even easy with a little ingenuity. If you pay 250 bucks for a kegerator, you paid too much. I find them on Craig's list and yard sales all the time. Don't think I've ever payed over 150 for one, and it came with 15 gallon commercial keg, which I converted to boil kettle, thusly saving me even more money. You just gotta be patient and you can get it at a cheap price.

Bottom line, it's all about preference and opinion. Some like to bottle some like to keg. If friends want a bottle of my brew, they bring me their bottles/growlers and I'm happy to fill them. Arguing over bottle vs keg is like arguing Ford vs Chevy.

 

[Newsman]

The downside, for me, is 5 gallons is a lot of beer. And 6 of those is even worse.

I have yet to find the middle ground between having variety and keeping beer moving.

There's the 2.5 gallon kegs.

 

[Owly055]

Another big advantage that keggers have over bottlers is that we have the ability to can our beer.






View attachment 277752

The only reason I can see for this is to use a soft drink can for when you are driving....

H.W.

 

[Psylocide]

The only reason I can see for this is to use a soft drink can for when you are driving....

H.W.

More for when people are over and I don't want to share, so I give them the Busch Light and fill mine with deliciousness.

 

[azazel1024]

I hated bottling. I switched to keggin pretty early (before fermentation temp control) and I'm pretty sure if I hadn't gone to kegging I would have eventually stopped brewing because I hated it so much.

I love when people guesstimate how fast they can do things. Bottling consumed an afternoon for me. It wasn't something I did between getting home from work and making dinner. It was time consuming, messy and completely unenjoyable. Just before I switched to kegging I had let a couple batches sit in the fermentor several extra weeks because I was dreading bottling them.

I am not saying I love it, but my typical process is either sanitize in the oven the night before and bottle the next day, or do it about 3hrs before bottling and open the oven to cool faster.

When my wife helps, I enjoy bottling a lot more. A couple of things that improved the process for me was finally getting a siphon clamp so I wasn't standing there like a schmuck holding a siphon for 5-10 minutes. The other was switching to using my oven instead of sanitizing in my bottling bucket with idophor. When I actually sit down to bottle from start to finish with clean up usually is about 90 minutes. So if I do it in the evenings, once my kids are to sleep, I generally start about 8:30 and I am done by 10pm. If I do it on the weekends I usually do it before lunch or right after lunch.

The only time I hate life with bottling is when I do something stupid like brew 3-4 things in the course of a week or two. Then I tend to end up bottling 3-4 times in a week or two, or maybe three. Then by the end I am dreading when I need to bottle a batch. When I am only bottling once a month or so, I don't mind it.

 

[azazel1024]

For me, it's totally the opposite. I can regulate just fine, but I may give my wife the "look" after about 7 beers. There's a reason one of my brews is called "wife screamer!" :cross:

The reason why if I ever go keg, I will. Never. Keg. My. Pumpkin Ale.

I'd keg it and the next week I'd be trying to figure out why nothing is coming out of the tap and it would take me 15 minutes of fiddling to realize my wife already kicked the keg.

 

[Owly055]

I'm "pseudo kegging", and like the results using my Tap-a-Draft system. I'll soon have a paintball bottle for serving pressure.
The real downside is that about half my fridge space is beer now, with 3 Tap-a-Draft bottles, half a dozen .5L flip tops, one 2.5 gallon batch cold crashing, and one lagering.

I'm being forced to rely on beer more and more to meet my nutritional needs. For example, I brew a grapefruity IPA as a breakfast drink. This eliminates the need for orange or grapefruit juice. Eggs are a staple........ They are in the door, and take up none of the critical beer space. I removed one crisper drawer........ I don't like them anyway as they freeze veggies instead of crisping them. I keep only enough meat, fruit, and produce as I need. I'm now eating spent grains with oatmeal stout over it as a breakfast cereal, and trub pudding, trub pie, and trub ice cream are my normal deserts....... waste not want not. I see myself being forced to keep foods in my Coleman piezo electric cooler using the 110V adapter. I'll keep that out in the shed.......no reason to keep food in the house.... I'm consuming less and less actual solid food all the time ;-)

H.W.

 

[beernutz]

The reason why if I ever go keg, I will. Never. Keg. My. Pumpkin Ale.

I'd keg it and the next week I'd be trying to figure out why nothing is coming out of the tap and it would take me 15 minutes of fiddling to realize my wife already kicked the keg.

That is not a hypothetical problem. I regularly make a Blue Moon clone for my wife because it is about the only beer she likes. On the last 10 gallon batch I made, I kegged and force carbonated five gallons and left the other in the primary.

A couple of days ago, 18 days after I had first kegged it, she said to me, "boy I would really love one of your Blue Moons" but when she pulled the tap all she got was dregs. The pathetically sad look on her face was almost funny especially because I knew I was the main culprit as she really had not drank very much of it yet. What can I say, it came out better than usual.

 

[slym2none]

Those that say they don't have room to keg, that's just an excuse. It takes far more less room to house a 5 gallon keg AND the equipment to clean/maintain. You don't need a giant keezer. If you have room for 50 bottles, you have room for 1 5 gal keg.

On this point - I can spread out my bottles in 6-packs. They don't all have to go in the same place. Now, for conditioning, I put my bottles in my bedroom closet and can move them around, I don't have all the bottles in one spot. Can't do that with a keg.

So, I am sorry, but the space concern is valid.

 

[SnakeRidge]

On this point - I can spread out my bottles in 6-packs. They don't all have to go in the same place. Now, for conditioning, I put my bottles in my bedroom closet and can move them around, I don't have all the bottles in one spot. Can't do that with a keg.

So, I am sorry, but the space concern is valid.

True. I condition all my beers down in the basement, but there is no way I'm fighting giant spiders and aggressive mushrooms every time I want to have a pint.

 

[slym2none]

Sounds like you need Frodo's Sting!

 

[SnakeRidge]

Sounds like you need Frodo's Sting!

I refer to my machete as Sting.

 

[azazel1024]

That is not a hypothetical problem. I regularly make a Blue Moon clone for my wife because it is about the only beer she likes. On the last 10 gallon batch I made, I kegged and force carbonated five gallons and left the other in the primary.

A couple of days ago, 18 days after I had first kegged it, she said to me, "boy I would really love one of your Blue Moons" but when she pulled the tap all she got was dregs. The pathetically sad look on her face was almost funny especially because I knew I was the main culprit as she really had not drank very much of it yet. What can I say, it came out better than usual.

Yeah...I am thinking I am going to brew my Belgian single again soon. It isn't exactly a Blue Moon clone, but it is rather Blue Moon-ish.

The look on my wifes face when she cracked a bottle...I know I'll be brewing this again. The saving grace is she had minor surgery, so she can't drink for 2 weeks. Allows them to finish bottle conditioning as well as me take a rest from brewing for a couple of weeks. That and it was a big batch, so even she will take a little while helping me drink through the 5 gallons of beer.

 

[azazel1024]

I refer to my machete as Sting.

Hey, whatever you want to knick name it, just know your wife probably has a different nickname for it.

 

[SnakeRidge]

Hey, whatever you want to knick name it, just know your wife probably has a different nickname for it.

I think you may be winkingly referring to the Sword of Truth.

 

[MattyIce]

I keg. I enjoy bottling, but kegging saves me a lot of time, carbs high gravity stuff quickly, and allows me to share beers with the uninitiated without having to explain away sediment.

I still bottle now and then. Turns out a keg is also the best bottling bucket I could imagine to use.

 

[wilserbrewer]

Turns out a keg is also the best bottling bucket I could imagine to use.

Haha, funny but true.
A keg is a bottling bucket dispensing perfectly carbed, cold conditioned, sediment free, crystal clear beer.

I like kegs!

 

[Gameface]

Last few posts for the win.

Kegging doesn't stop you from doing anything you can do bottling.

It does cost more up front.

It does take up more space.

Other than that, it is an enabling technology, not a disabling one. You can do everything you did as a bottler after you start kegging, and in many cases you can do it better.

 

[roastglint]

When My keg kicks I literally rise with really hot water right away and push hot water through my lines. Takes like 10 min tops. Never had an infection. Push More hot water through the system before I sanitize when I'm ready to keg (20min).
Plus once you purge and put your beer on gas you really cant **** it up anymore. So that's dope as well.

 

[azazel1024]

I keg. I enjoy bottling, but kegging saves me a lot of time, carbs high gravity stuff quickly, and allows me to share beers with the uninitiated without having to explain away sediment.

I still bottle now and then. Turns out a keg is also the best bottling bucket I could imagine to use.

This is the biggest reason why I may switch to kegging as soon as I can.

Its a pain to explain to the noobs D) that "no, don't drink out of the bottle, pour it in to a cup/glass and make sure you pour carefully avoiding the last half an ounce in the bottom so you don't get the dregs".

So when I have people over I always feel compelled that I have to server them so they don't end up with the dregs.

Though often times once I am 3 beers deep I just go "F it, they can drink the dregs if they want, I am done with this bartending crap".

I feel like it still makes an actual party of more than 3-4 guests a lot easier with a keg though.

 

[Psylocide]

When My keg kicks I literally rise with really hot water right away and push hot water through my lines. Takes like 10 min tops. Never had an infection. Push More hot water through the system before I sanitize when I'm ready to keg (20min).
Plus once you purge and put your beer on gas you really cant **** it up anymore. So that's dope as well.

I just leave it hooked up and pour more beer in. I've got three batches through one keg in the last couple months.

Might clean that one out now... maybe.

 

[RmikeVT]

One thing I haven't seen anyone mention that I often do: I bottle a 6'er or a 12'er from the keg. I can save the beer, give it away, take on road trips etc. Its cold, carbonated and clear. I can give the beer to friends with no instructions. If they pour into a glass it will be clear and free of yeast clumps or they can drink right from the bottle. If I don't give to friends I can toss in the basement and save for another day, long after the keg has run dry.

 

[IronLion409]

I have a dual keg setup. Bought after my first batch. I bottle too. We share a lot of beer and bottles can be stored longer without losing carbonation. If the people I share with don't get pouring into a glass then they probably aren't interested anyway. If someone lives close that I'm sharing with I'll fill growlers. Since the people I share with aren't homebrewers I get lots of cool craft beer to try as a trade. I try to bottle a few from each batch regardless so I can try them at different ages. I had a brown ale I made on my second batch ever the other day. I must say I've made some progress. Not to mention being able to take a case camping, vacationing, visiting family, etc. My wife really likes home brewed beer too so she helps me bottle. So I guess my point is why limit myself to just kegging when there are advantages to both.

 

[xcdarrel17]

I bottled probably 25 batches before switching to kegging and don't plan to go back except the occasional brew. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet: your IPAs will most likely improve when you switch to kegging with less exposure to oxygen. I found that no matter how many hops and dry hops I used, my bottled IPAs would fall off quickly and leave me wanting more.