Newbie with first brew, tips welcome.

[Muttley99]

New member here. Trying to gain some answers after my first brew.

Bit of a background,

No brewing experience.
Basic coopers tin, Canadian blonde + brew enhancer, 1 week fermentation. Racked to an Aeb 19l keg and trying to force carbonate with co2 and dispensed through a venom 801 beer fridge with an in line fobber.

Ended up with a fob fest pouring foam but with a relatively flat beer. Any tips?

 

[JohnSand]

Welcome aboard!
I don't recognize the term "fobber", but I keg and carb through the lid gas fitting.
One week may not be enough to ferment. I know that many hopped extracts advertise "beer in one week", but I use three weeks unless I'm in a big hurry. Whatever the challenges, you can find answers on this forum.
Good luck, keep us posted.

 

[Muttley99]

Cheers. I've binned the batch and I've got another one on that's a week in so I'll leave it at least another week before racking.

The fobber is just an in line fitting that helps remove any foaming and shuts the line down if the keg is empty.

Do you use a calculator to work out priming your keg based on the beer type and temp or do you just calculate from the recommended bottling ratios?

Do you prime differently if forcing carbonation?

How long would you recommend to condition. Is it the same as bottling time frame for that type of beer?

Sorry I have so many questions!

 

[taralph]

Hi Muttley,
I may be confused about your question but a force carbonated keg is typically not primed. Just put it under pressure and follow your preferred process. When I keg condition my priming ratio is less than bottling assuming the keg is full. I would need to look in my records for a specific rate but I typically spund to my desired pressure and let it sit for a couple of weeks.

I am by no means an expert on draft systems and not familiar with the model you mention or the fobber. However, if you are Force carbing and didn’t drop the pressure back down to serving pressure you will get foam as the beer line won’t provide enough head loss and the beer will come flying out. until I figured out how to size the length of my beer lines I served my friends a lot of foam (they didn’t seem to mind). This was particularly true of the saison and farmhouse ales that I like to serve at higher volumes.

If you give a little more detail on how you are Force carbing and your serving pressure, etc. we can troubleshoot.

 

[Muttley99]

I currently don't have a chiller large enough to put my keg in so this may have been an added factor on where the carbonation has gone wrong.

On the batch in question I didn't prime at all. I sat the keg in a bucket of ice to get the temp down and insulated the top half of the keg. I then used a dispense gas equilibrium pressure calculator and set the desired co2 pressure to desolved co2 content of 2.7. The dispense pressure was then increase to ambient offset to dispense but dropped to 2.5 volumes.

Hope that made sense.

 

[taralph]

Very interesting set up. I worked a 2.5 gallon keg out of a cooler for a couple of years. Never lasted more than one night!

If I am reading your slide rule correctly, you are set for about 10psi which sounds right. This may be a case of the beer being warm and/or the pressure still being higher than you planned. You should be able to get by with a 3-5 foot liquid line but you don’t want the beer coming out too fast or it will foam.
I recommend :
1. Get a proper trash can and ice that mother down. Including the liquid line as much as you can. Canadians can’t be too cold! The pressure calc will depend on the average temperature of the beer, not the lowest value.

2. Pull the PRV and make sure you don’t have a bunch of residual pressure from the force carb. If you only iced the bottom few inches it is still warm up top and will push on the beer.

If that doesn’t work, turn off your gas and see what happens. You may still have too much gas in your beer and it will let down over time and “self dispense”. When it seems to come out right, turn the gas back on.

Also check you beer line length. I use this calculator. Determining Proper hose length for your Kegerator

But there are other that are good, too.

Disclaimer: I am constantly tweaking my keezer trying to get consistent pours. I have not mastered it but I did deal with very foamy beer until I got pressure and line length dialed in.

Good luck and let us know how it goes