Natural Carbing in a keg, about how long?

[cegan09]

I didn't have a free CO2 line, so i'm trying natural carbing for the first time while I kick one of my current kegs. Cold crashed beer into the keg and I added priming sugar based on a calculator. I did aim a touch low on carb levels figuring I'd finish it up with the bottle once it goes into the kegorator. Closed the keg then borrowed a CO2 line for a minute to purge and set an initial pressure to hopefully seal it.

I left the keg out at room temp (65ish?) to hopefully warm and do it's thing. Any recommendations for how long this usually takes? I've never tried before, and I don't want to be cracking the valve occasionally since it needs to hold pressure to carbonate.

 

[Bombo80]

I did this once before. I even went to the point of building a spunding valve. The valve vents the excess pressure and not over carb the beer. The problem I had was my beer almost never flowed clear until the beer was almost gone. If I did this again, I would dedicate a keg, or buy another dip tube and cut it off so it would be above the layer of lees.

As far as time to carb, I think mine was about a week or two. Similar to bottle carbing.

Good Luck.

 

[cubalz]

I just have to ask, why? Not trying to be smart but I cannot figure out why would you add all of the complexity when you could just transfer your beer to the keg, turn on the gas and force carbonate it. Again, just trying to understand the rationale.

 

[cegan09]

I just have to ask, why? Not trying to be smart but I cannot figure out why would you add all of the complexity when you could just transfer your beer to the keg, turn on the gas and force carbonate it. Again, just trying to understand the rationale.

Like I said, I don't have a free CO2 line at the moment. I only have a 2 keg setup, and while I thought I would have emptied one of the kegs in time to put this one in, I haven't. So I figured I'd give it a shot. I know a bunch of people do it this way. It's really not complicated at all, just throw your priming sugar addition in the keg and rack onto it. I'm not fermenting in the keg, so I don't expect it to build a huge layer of yeast at the bottom. This is just to carbonate like you would with bottles.

Some people say that doing this lets the yeast scavenge any last bits of oxygen. How true is that? Don't know. Figured it was worth trying.