Kegging beer and force carbonating

[Avanius]

Hello, I am fairly new to brewing and I'm trying to get al my equipment together for purchase and all that fun stuff. What I wanted to know are technical questions.

1. When do you keg your beer?
2. Do you add priming sugar?
3. Do you filter the beer before you keg or do you let it clarify?
4. How do you force carbonate?

I am a visual and literal learner so if you want to post you tube links please do so. I just want to know the correct order of doing things right before I dive head first and mess this up.
Thanks for your time.

 

[mew]

Here are my 2 cents:

1. When do you keg your beer? I keg my beer once all yeast action is complete. Fermentation is usually complete after 3-4 days, but the yeast are still actively absorbing their previous waste products for a week or two after that, depending on the beer. Once the yeast is done working, the beer should taste pretty good, but may have a few rough edges. At that point, the beer will benefit more from cold aging than warm.

2. Do you add priming sugar? I don't add priming sugar to the keg because I don't want a pile of yeast at the bottom of the keg. Priming will cause cell division. I also find it easier to get the right level of carbonation if I force carb.

3. Do you filter the beer before you keg or do you let it clarify? I do not filter my beer, as this would be very costly, labor-intensive, and arguably unnecessary. I let the beer age cold in the keg until it is clear and use finings like gelatin if it is slow to clear. Two weeks at 35 F is usually enough to clear a beer of chill haze.

4. How do you force carbonate? Carbonation level is a function of two variables: 1) temperature, and 2) pressure. The lower the temp, the more soluble the gas is in liquid. The gas is also more soluble at higher pressures. Below is a link to a chart showing the correlation between volumes of CO2 (i.e. the amount of dissolved CO2 in the beer) and temperature/pressure. For a reference, a typical american Pale Ale or IPA would be around 2.5 volumes of CO2. It will take a week or so for the gas to dissolve into the beer if you set the regulator at a certain pressure and just wait. Alternatively, you could could set the regulator at 30 PSI for a day and then dial it back to the desired final PSI level. If that isn't fast enough for you, you can get the beer cold, crank the regulator to 30 PSI, and shake or rock the get to dissolve the CO2 faster. That last method is a little risky because you might overcarbonate the beer. I don't find it necessary to carb onate that fast anyway because the beer will benefit from at least two weeks of cold storage anyway.

http://www.kegerators.com/carbonation-table.php