1. Nope. I have zero issues getting anything into the dry hop keg. I generally soft crash to 60 for 1 or 2 days, so I end up with a nice compact yeast cake underneath the spigot. I’m not dry hopping at all in the fermenter so there are no hops to clog anything either. Here’s how I transfer:
View attachment 723556The tubing from the spigot is just standard beverage tubing connected to a QD.
2. Yes, the c02 that is created during fermentation passes through both the dry hop keg and serving keg, purging them of the oxygen contained within. I just run a tube from the serving keg down into a jug of star San....no different than a traditional airlock. If you really
want to do everything you can, you can liquid purge your serving keg first, and then also run all of the c02 through it as well. I’ve also done this same setup with only liquid purging the serving keg, not running the fermentation c02 through it as well, and that works too. But to me, it’s easy enough to do both so why not.
When you’re ready to jump from the dry hop keg to the serving keg, it looks like this: Remember, there is a 300 micron Janish type filter over the diptube in the dryhop keg.
View attachment 723558
I’ll give you a tip though. Once you are ready to transfer from the dry hop keg to your serving keg, start flowing in some co2 to the dry hop keg around 6-8 psi...but before you attach the jumper, attach a beverage qd with nothing attached to it at all. Point it towards some grass and as soon as you connect it with some pressure in the keg, it’s going to start shooting out beer. Because I generally dry hop anywhere from 8-12 ounces, there’s going to be a little sludge that gets through. As soon as beer starts shooting out you’ll see that it looks like dark hop sludge, but after 1-2 seconds it Clears up and just looks like regular beer. As soon as you notice the change pull the qd off, and then connect it to the jumper and proceed with the transfer from the DryHop keg to the serving keg. This way you’ve gotten rid of the initial sludge that could potentially cause a clog. I’ve done this a number of times and I highly recommend shooting out that hop sludge first.
I’ll also add there are a number of different variations and ways to do this, but this has been working well for me and the equipment that I have.