How long does it take to keg

[Deadalus]

I can fill a keg in the time it takes to read this post.

I'm kidding this is a good summary.

I still think the metric isn't as much time as it is effort or "actively engaged time". If you just start a stopwatch at the moment you begin and shut it off when you have 5 gallons in either bottles or kegs it's probably close and likely is most dependent on a person's process and how fast they push. The fact that I can get either a star san push or a closed transfer started and I can then walk away and do other brewing tasks or eat dinner or mow the lawn or whatever is a huge factor in making kegging easier. It is reducing oxygen that made me get into kegging, but based on the effort I'd never go back. Heck I bought mini kegs to avoid bottling for taking my beer on the road for things like tailgating because of it.

I wanted to get at what you are saying here but indeed the post was already rather long! There are points in the entire kegging process where little activity is needed on the part of the operator. There's a mental aspect affecting perceived effort as well. I don't mind very much washing bottles and sanitizing bottles but some people hate it so much it probably influences their perception of those tasks. Which is completely understandable. And I don't mind bottling either, which again, some find tedious. I tend to daydream and reminisce about places I've lived at years ago where I also brewed and bottled.

 

[Bobby_M]

the way i look at it is its like one big bottle so whatever times it used to take me to bottle 48 bottles of beer its 1/48th that time. seriously tho keggin is so much quicker than bottling in so many ways like stated above. no label peeling no cleaning 48 bottles no sanitizing 48 packages etc.

kegging can actually be made even quicker. when i transfer wort to my FV the spigot is already attached to the clean sanitized purged keg. via the gas outlet. i just bleed the keg . leave the prv open. open the spigot and the beer starts to flow.

There are a lot of nuances that people tend to overlook and if you couple that with everyone's varying use of used bottles vs. new and/or their bottle rinsing habits, the time can vary a lot.

Let's talk about ways bottlers might optimize time.

Buy new bottles - no label removal and cigarette butt cleaning.
Rinse a bottle with hot water blasts as soon as you pour the beer. Can likely skip the cleaning and just sanitize these, at least for a batch or two.
Use a "vinator" to squirt sanitizer into the bottles
Use a high quality bench capper that is secured to a work surface
If I sanitize all the needed bottles and have them in a drying rack ahead of time, I can fill bottles with my left hand while I'm capping the previous one with my right hand. If the fill rate is still too slow for you, using a keg as a bottling tank can not only reduce oxygen exposure and allow for very good sugar mixing, it also let's you run a couple PSI of filling pressure to speed the dispense even without gravity assist.

When you move over to kegging, the effort and time is going to depend on how convinced you are of the necessity of certain tasks.

First, it should be said. There are some beer styles that benefit from bottle conditioning, e.g. Belgian beers and German Weissebier.

If you don't have a keg washer that blasts cleaner through the posts, you should take the posts apart between every fill to clean (including running a brush down the long draw tube.

You should also be filling the kegs to the top with 5 gallons of starsan and pushing it all out with CO2 prior to filling. Many people don't, and they say their beer is fine, but it would be more fine if they purged properly. Alternative methods involve running fermentation CO2 through empty sanitized kegs to do the same purging job, but this does require some extra setup on brew day.

All this is to say that there are ways to make both packaging operations better, faster, cheaper and they are competing goals. Beer quality MAY improve when switching between methods depending how much or little care you took with the previous method (in case it's not clear, bottle conditioning may be a better oxygen prevention method over the long term if you're just filling kegs through an open lid).

I think time savings is not really a prime motivator here. There are reasons to do both. I keg 95% of my brewed beers and then almost 100% of the time I bottle a six pack using a beer gun for competition entries. That's not a time savings at all.