kegging elitism

[Hello]

You should go back and hand him some instructions on how to properly pour a bottle of HB into a glass. That'll learn him.

If bottling is an inferior method of serving and storing beer then there are a **** ton of craft breweries out there that are inferior. I feel like the comments are those made by the same people who overuse the term "sessionable."

As much as I'd like to keg, I want it out of convenience, not some superior thought process that my beer will be better.

 

[unionrdr]

I still say this all goes back to their perception of the "cool crowd" that brews all grain & kegs their beer. you ain't shizz & brew chinese toilet water if you don't. And you call those dinosaur farts aroma?! Then they somehow have to logistize the hundreds of dollars spent on kegging & AG equipment with this sort of drivel. It seems to be the point of diminishing returns when they start looking down their noses at bottlers,PM'rs,extract brewers & the like. Everybody wants to be better than somebody. Especially around this developement.

 

[AnOldUR]

 

[ICWiener]

Isn't it table sugar that is supposed to leave the cider taste?

Only if you are adding it at 20+% of your total fermentables.

 

[one-L]

No, not the people who say kegging is SOOO much easier than bottling. I have encountered a new form of elitist. In the last sixth months I have had two seperate people knock my beers as tasting bottle conditioned. One was a blonde ale with an off flavor (something with the fermenter I believe) that a guy said was cidery from priming with corn sugar.

The second was last weekend. I took some Oktoberfest to the new lhbs because I know the owner. It was my first all grain batch and it was a little light on the maltiness. So 4 people are tasting it and one asks me how old it is. I inform him it has only been in the bottle 3 weeks so it might be a tad green (I don't think it was) and he says "ah, that's what I am tasting, this is a bottle conditioned beer!" It was not a flattering tone either.

So I throw myself onto the wisdom of hbt. Is there actually a taste one could pick up on bottled beer that is not desirable and isn't found in kegged beer? Or are these guys taking keg snob to new levels?

Disclaimer: I totally want to start kegging and don't want to sound like I am against it.

I have to say, I am surprised you could understand what they were saying with how far up their a$$es their heads much have been.

 

[Whattawort]

I keg because, well, I'm a lazy SOB and bottling just takes too long and requires precious real estate for all the bottles. That being said, I actually prefer bottle aged homebrew over kegged. Kegged beer may look prettier, but it seems to be lacking certain qualities that are present in the bottles (at least with my beer). I find that my bottle aged beers tend to be more refined and closer to the profile I was aiming for than my kegged stuff. I really am my own worst critic, but if you were to put one of my bottle aged beers and my kegged beer in front of me I could tell you which was which pretty easily. I'll usually make a session beer for the keg and have a serious beer in the bottles.

 

[DrunkleJon]

Meh. Bottling sucks. Kegging sucks. The cool kids are all packaging their beers in the bags out of boxed wine. Sheesh. Get it together all!

 

[hunter_le five]

Meh. Bottling sucks. Kegging sucks. The cool kids are all packaging their beers in the bags out of boxed wine. Sheesh. Get it together all!

I just drink mine straight out of the primary with a curly straw. Much less hassle.

 

[mattd2]

I judged a competition a few months ago and was paired with a non-BJCP judge. He kept taking his flashlight to the bottom of the bottle for each entry and either loudly proclaimed "Bottle Conditioned" or "Kegged". I could tell from his tone that he had some kind of weird bias against bottle conditioned beer. I asked him what his point was and he didn't really have one. There is certainly some elitism with kegging, but as others have said in this thread some of the most expensive beer in the world is bottled conditioned.

Do you remember how your scores compared to his and if there was a constant lower score from him for the "inferrior" beer?

I still say this all goes back to their perception of the "cool crowd" that brews all grain & kegs their beer. you ain't shizz & brew chinese toilet water if you don't. And you call those dinosaur farts aroma?! Then they somehow have to logistize the hundreds of dollars spent on kegging & AG equipment with this sort of drivel. It seems to be the point of diminishing returns when they start looking down their noses at bottlers,PM'rs,extract brewers & the like. Everybody wants to be better than somebody. Especially around this developement.

Sweet I am finally in with the cool kids... only took 29 years too! I agree with all those that have said the guy sounds like he just wants to be better than the OP, my reasoning is if he truely suspected/knew that bottle conditioning was the reason for the issues he had with the beer he would of gone on to explain himself and offer a solution to the "problem" - not just a brushoff "this beer ain't good enough for me because its bottle conditioned".

 

[mattd2]

I just drink mine straight out of the primary with a curly straw. Much less hassle.

Well actually (couldn't resist) you could do that with close-system pressurised fermentation

 

[Rhumbline]

I just drink mine straight out of the primary with a curly straw. Much less hassle.

Pfffffftttt!

The curly straw oxygenates the beer, I can immediately tell if I've drunk beer through a curly straw and the loops cause the flavonoids to be slung out of suspension due to centrifugal force, thus further affecting the taste. The difference is obvious.

Noobs!

 

[Halbrust]

I just drink mine straight out of the primary with a curly straw. Much less hassle.

How Egyptian of you!

 

[bzwyatt]

Papazian's column in the current Zymurgy - Take Care of Your Craft Beer - mentions a benefit of bottle-conditioning.

'Homebrewers and any brewers who referment/bottle condition their beers have a slight edge on preserving the fresh quality of their beer. Live yeast scavenge oxygen while in the bottle and reduce the effects of oxidation.'

Kegs/bottles, buckets/carboys, plastic/glass, aluminum/steel, blah blah blah. The guy at my LHBS can be a jerk, he is very condescending. Now that I do all grain and shop there a lot (and winning a competition with one of his recipes might have helped, too), he is cool with me, but he likes to treat people like they aren't good enough to brew. That seems to a common thing in brewing, more than other interests I've been involved in.

 

[Hammy71]

There is nothing wrong with bottle conditioning. However, chances are if you took a few bottles to your LHBS, the yeasties got pretty stirred up in the bottle. Maybe the fellows at the shop were tasting the yeast....something that wouldn't be in a botttle if off of a kegger. Just some food for thought.....

 

[kaconga]

Thanks everybody! Your comments really cheered me up.

There is nothing wrong with bottle conditioning. However, chances are if you took a few bottles to your LHBS, the yeasties got pretty stirred up in the bottle. Maybe the fellows at the shop were tasting the yeast....something that wouldn't be in a botttle if off of a kegger. Just some food for thought.....

This is definitely possible, but wouldn't it have been a yeasty comment rather than a bottling one. If I taste yeast then I say something tastes yeasty. Not "I taste the bottle conditioning." Maybe he was just not expressing himself well.

 

[the_bird]

Well, what does "bottle conditioning" mean other than "there's yeast in them there bottles!"? I contend that it's the yeast that this person is noticing, as was noted there's a good chance it was stirred up on the trip to the shop.

 

[broadbill]

I'm sorry, I missed all the post where the kegging people were telling the bottling people they were making an inferior product.

For every "cool crowd" person who pontificates that their way is the best way, there is another person who is insecure and feels the need to get offended over what they think someone else is thinking.

 

[unionrdr]

...or just plain insulted by narrow minded arrogance that in itself is insecure,showing that a "cool crowd" that brews AG & kegs is in every concievable way superior to the rest of us. That in itself is shallow & foolish.
I brew the way I do & bottle the way I do because that's what I enjoy & I've made it easy as can be & an enjoyable part of the process. And isn't that why we're all really here??!

 

[TyTanium]

Next time bring him a bottle pulled from a keg.

"Yeah, has that bottle conditioned flavor"
"That's funny, I just pulled it from the keg 30 mins ago. Maybe you're full of it?"

Elitism is part of every hobby. I highly recommend devoting approximately zero mental energy on it.

 

[the_bird]

Meh, some people are dicks. Not a lot you can do about that other than not take it to heart and not be a dick yourself. **** it, have a homebrew and let it go.

 

[BreezyBrew]

I keg because, well, I'm a lazy SOB and bottling just takes too long and requires precious real estate for all the bottles. That being said, I actually prefer bottle aged homebrew over kegged. Kegged beer may look prettier, but it seems to be lacking certain qualities that are present in the bottles (at least with my beer). I find that my bottle aged beers tend to be more refined and closer to the profile I was aiming for than my kegged stuff.

I completely agree with this and have always found bottle conditioning to be superior. Sometimes I find kegged brew is as good as bottle conditioned but never the other way around. Long live bottle conditioning! (Even though I mostly keg due to time and space constraints)

Great topic.

 

[AnOldUR]

I completely agree with this and have always found bottle conditioning to be superior. Sometimes I find kegged brew is as good as bottle conditioned but never the other way around.

It's really style dependent. Nothing better than a freshly dry hopped, well brewed IPA. Three or four weeks of bottle conditioning and it's starting to lose that wonderful aroma and flavor. Same could be said for most wheat beers. Get'um in the glass!

 

[satph]

A quick search shows that Boulevard and Jester King naturally carbonate all of their beers.

Jester King says: "We’ve now done more comparisons than we can count between force carbonated and naturally conditioned versions of all of our beers, and we all consistently judge the naturally conditioned versions to be more flavorful, complex and interesting than their force carbonated counterparts."

Boulevard says: "All of Boulevard’s ales are bottle conditioned, an old-world brewing tradition that creates a secondary fermentation in the bottle, resulting in a beer that tastes fresher, better, longer"

Here's a blog post about naturally- vs force-carbonating. He says he's completed tests and "There is a marked difference." I like this BYO article about carbonating too.

I recently made a big brown ale that would benefit from a little aging. So I decided to add sugar and let it naturally carbonate in the keg. This forced me to avoid tapping it for at least 3 weeks. I'm probably going to hold off on tapping it until the middle of November.

I wonder if the biggest advantage of naturally carbonating is ensuring a month of age on beers that will benefit from it.

It's really style dependent. Nothing better than a freshly dry hopped, well brewed IPA. Three or four weeks of bottle conditioning and it's starting to lose that wonderful aroma and flavor. Same could be said for most wheat beers. Get'um in the glass!

Except for hefeweizens that are supposed to be cloudy. If you keg them the sediment will go with the first pints, and by the end of the keg you've got a crystal clear beer.

 

[wilserbrewer]

Some "bottle conditioned" commercial beers state it right on the label as a badge of honor of sorts.

To say bottle conditioned beer is inferior is a sign of beer ignorance.

I would also say the person was grasping for something to say and be "right".

I recently filled a keg, and had a few quarts left in the fermenter, right into bottles it went along with an educated guess of table sugar packets poured right in for priming, not sure I even sanitized the bottles...the beer was great and certainly as good as the kegged version.

 

[DrunkleJon]

I completely agree with this and have always found bottle conditioning to be superior. Sometimes I find kegged brew is as good as bottle conditioned but never the other way around. Long live bottle conditioning! (Even though I mostly keg due to time and space constraints)

Great topic.

There is one commercial beer that I find drinkable only from a keg. Rolling Rock. While nothing special, it is terrible out of the bottle and actually not horrible if from a keg. I blame the green bottles, and the fact that the kegs are fresher and stored cold.

Then again. not bottle conditioned.

 

[AnOldUR]

Except for hefeweizens that are supposed to be cloudy. If you keg them the sediment will go with the first pints, and by the end of the keg you've got a crystal clear beer.

Wheat beers are cloudy because of yeast and proteins from the wheat in suspension. If that's what you're looking for a yeast with low flocculation and a good percentage of wheat should be used. If brewed correctly your haze should not be gone after the first pour. Sure, if the keg sits long enough yeast and protien will eventually settle, but since these beers are to be drank young, that's not a problem. When you order a Hefeweizen on tap at a bar is it crystal clear? And unless your rolling your bottles before pouring, they will eventually settle also.

 

[unionrdr]

Good to see some pro brewers finding that natural carbonation & conditioning makes for better quality. I've gotten to where bottling is easy & fairly quick.

 

[beersk]

I have never noticed cidery flavors from bottling. The < 5 oz of sugar is not enough to be noticeable in a batch. The only flavors I have noticed that are contributed by bottling would be due to stirring up more yeast due to transporting.

As for kegs, you can get off flavors from them as well.

I keg for convenience. It is far easier for me to clean and sanitize one keg and the autosiphon than it is to do 2 cases of bottles, a bottling bucket, the bottling wand, autosiphon, tubing, caps...

This right here is what bothers me about the pro-kegging crowd. I keg all my beers and will bottle the occasional batch. But I don't think kegging is neither easier nor quicker. Yes, it's quicker to get the beer INTO the keg than into 50 bottles. However, using one of those bottle tree squirter dealiers for bottles makes life WAY easier.
Also, if you do a good job of rinsing out each bottle after you pour one, all you really have to do when you're ready to fill them again is sanitize them. I sanitize the bottles while the priming sugar is boiling, it really takes on a few minutes with a bottle tree and sulfiter dealie.
So, if you factor in cleaning your beer lines, your kegs, etc, unless you're lazy and don't keep your sh*t clean, it takes as long or longer than bottling.

Lately, when bottling, I've taken to a hybrid approach where I'll use a keg as a bottling "bucket" and push the beer into bottles with co2 through a picnic tap with a wand attached to it. Works really well. Plus I can seal the keg and roll it around to evenly distribute the priming solution.

Anyway, if you do it right, bottling can be really easy, easier and cheaper than kegging. I'd bottle, but I've got all the sh*t already for kegging, plus a sweet collar that my stepdad built for me for my chest freezer. So, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to go back at this point.
Besides, having kegged beer is nice as you can pour any amount at anytime you want. I probably drink way more than I would if it were in bottles.

But, nobody should be knocking bottled beer. There's no reason it should be any different than kegged beer and it sounds like those homebrew shop dudes don't know what the hell they're talking about.

I took a sample of my beer once to a brewery for the brewer and staff to try and I said it was an extract batch, just felt like doing an extract beer, and one of them said, "Oh, that's what that is..." What? You're kidding me dude. This was a hefe and it tasted great. Whatever, dude. Some people don't know WTF they're talking about.

 

[unionrdr]

Yeah,like beatin a dead horse or arguing with a brick wall.

 

[seanybubbles]

kegs, bottles, I can't tell the difference when serving between the two. I do find kegging easier though. Which makes you a better brewer and therefore a better person.