Half keg/half bottle questions

[timschram]

When my brother and I package or collab brews, I typically keg my half (~2.5 gallons) and he bottles his half (also ~2.5 gallons). Since we started doing this, we have had quite a few batches on the bottle side turn into gushers.

Typically what we do is siphon my half into the sanitized keg, then siphon his half into a bottling bucket and mix with the correct amount of priming sugar.

As we had never had a problem with gushers before, we are a bit perplexed as to why this is happening since this switch. When we were bottling the entire batch we very, very rarely had gushers.

Any suggestions?

 

[doug293cz]

Unless you are using the same amount of priming sugar for 2.5 gal that you used for 5 gal, it has to be something in your sanitation process. If your bottles and bottling bucket are sanitized the same as when you didn't have problems, then you are probably introducing contamination when you switch from racking to the bottling bucket from the keg. Is there a longer lag time between sanitizing bottles & bucket than before, where they could pick up atmospheric contamination?

Brew on

 

[ncbrewer]

Did you start rushing fermentation time when you made the switch. If you're bottling/kegging sooner, maybe it's not quite finished fermenting.