Natural keg carbing - What did I do wrong?

[Kraftwerk]

Hi all,

I am new to kegging, and I am limited to naturally carbing with corn sugar and dispensing with a co2 charger. Not an ideal setup, I know, but I am determined to make it work. My first batch pours with a nice foamy head, but no bubbles in the beer. Here's what I did, please tell me how I can do better next time:

- Racked finished beer to keg with enough corn sugar for 2.5 volumes co2
- purged head space with co2 and sealed with a little pressure
- let sit at room temp for two weeks
- purged most, but not all pressure (there was a very loud hiss when I pulled the release valve)
- put in fridge for a day, now serving beer with nice head but no bubbles

 

[SuperSynapse]

You need to let your beer condition in the fridge. There's more to carbonation than just the priming sugar.

I'm force carbonating my beer, and it takes 10 days-2weeks to carbonate at 34 degrees. If it was at room temp during carbonation it would never carbonate to a desirable level. - hence no bubbles, the head is just the top level CO2 coming out of solution leaving a flat beer because your CO2 hasn't had a chance to dissolve in a liquid form.

I mentioned in another thread without response, but is it unkosher to just drop in a block of dry ice for $2 and let that do your carbonation? What do you have against using two little 0.5oz bottles to force carb your beer? They're like $0.75 each.

Make sure you are getting lube free gas. Seen a lot of people using the airsoft gas. Bad idea, not that any of it is food grade anyway.

I'm along the line of thought, that if you're going to keg, do it the right way and go all the way, otherwise bottle. Wine bottles that are brown work great for larger vessels.

 

[wolfman_48442]

- purged most, but not all pressure (there was a very loud hiss when I pulled the release valve)

Doh! You just let most of your gas escape. If you calculated your corn sugar for 2.5 volumes at serving temperature (which will make it higher at room temp), you would have been fine to just chill the beer.

 

[Kraftwerk]

So what you guys are saying is that I should have put the keg in the fridge for a week or two to let the co2 dissolve, without purging any pressure beforehand, right?

SuperSynapse, are you saying I could just squeeze in two keg chargers to force carbonate? It seems it would be really difficult to get desired carbonation that way, as the keg chargers are totally unregulated. IOW there's no way to know how much pressure you are adding, let alone keep that pressure constant. Any tips? As for dry ice, there are some other threads on here about that and it doesn't sound safe.

 

[EdWort]

- let sit at room temp for two weeks
- purged most, but not all pressure (there was a very loud hiss when I pulled the release valve)
- put in fridge for a day, now serving beer with nice head but no bubbles

When you purged the keg before chilling, you vented most of the CO2 in the head space that would have gone into solution as the beer chilled.

Cold beer holds more CO2 and after the beer chilled, the CO2 would have been adsorbed till it reached equilibrium with the pressure in the head space.

Doh!