Filling a keg from spunded fermentation vessel

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ChrisfromAbby

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I've made my first attempt at spunding my FV with my home-crafted device on an Cascade/Falconers Flight IPA. I built in a racking cane with a valve and a industrial gas quick-connect fitting for the CO2 side. The racking cane is straight, otherwise it'd never fit through the assembly. It does not have one of those little plastic tips, so it will draw straight upwards into the cane from the bottom of the FV.
I used the CO2 blow off during fermentation to push Star-San out of one 1/6bbl keg into another to completely purge the first one.
I then put about 7psi of CO2 into the FV (1/2bbl keg) and opened up the outflow valve on the racking cane to fill thekeg.
I also used the CO2 being pushed out then purge yet another keg and collected the Star-San in a 5gal bucket.

My problems?
How do you know when your keg is full enough, without being over-full? You want a little headspace.
How to keep trub from getting sucked up into the racking cane, yet still get most of the beer out?
I dry-hopped during active fermentation, but how do you add finings without exposing to O2?

Chris
 

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Really nice setup!

How do you know when your keg is full enough, without being over-full? You want a little headspace.
Weigh it while filling. It's the best and easiest way. You'll need the tare weight with everything attached used during transfer.

Without a scale, you can fill the keg completely, which is hard to gauge, but you could wait for the gas (output) to start spitting/flowing beer. Then push out 1 quart into your 2nd keg.
 
What about fining? Since all the beer is to be transferred to a sealed & purged keg, is there a way to add gelatin or such to cold-crashed beer either before or after the transfer without introducing oxygen?
 
Some have built gizmos from a syringe and a gas quick disconnect, others have built things that one adds the fining solution and uses more pressure than is in the keg to push it in.

I don't bother any more and just use, gravity, time and temperature.
 
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