Homebrew Festival - Force carbonate or Sugar/natural Carbonate ?

[suitbrewing]

I will soon start preparing for a homebrewers festival where I will be contributing 4 sanke kegs.

I am trying to decide whether I should force carbonate the kegs in my keezer or whether I should use natural carbonation with sugar instead.
My aim is to reduce foaming. A secondary aim is to reduce cloudiness which may arise from driving the kegs to the location. I am assuming that force carbing would work better for clarity but I am not so sure about foaming.

The force carbonation process will be as follows:

- Once fermentation is finished, cold crush in fermenter
- Transfer could beer to Keg
- Place in keezer (2c)
- Force Carbonate
- Take out of keezer and let it warm up to room temperature
- Drive the Kegs to festival location
- Serve (warm keg, beer chilled through solenoid type chiller/dispenser)

The sugar alternative is as follows:

- Finish off fermentation @ around 20c
- Transfer to Keg with sugar solution and keep @ room temp to carbonate
- Drive the Kegs to festival location
- Serve (warm keg, beer chilled through solenoid type chiller/dispenser)

 

[porterpounder]

Forcing or priming will both work if you then transfer the carbed beer to a new keg prior to the transport. Otherwise, you're likely to get cloudiness either way, obviously less so with most carefully transferred forced-carbed beers. Foaming won't be an issue if you get the keg cold and settled for an hour or two prior to serving.

 

[suitbrewing]

Thanks for getting back.

The kegs will be at room temperature when dispensing. Cooling them down is not really an option.

We will be using one of this systems to cool the beer

So the concern is whether beer that was force carbonated while cold will by default foam up when it will warm up.

Last year I used priming sugar. The kegs where kept room temp throughout the process and I had not foaming issues.

 

[porterpounder]

The pressure laws are the same either way, so if it didn't foam with natural carb, it shouldn't with force carbing either. Those systems are neat.

 

[suitbrewing]

yes, they are very convenient for the festival. We have 3 x 2 so we can offer six different options at a time. We can change kegs on the fly without having to cool beer!