Can't see how there's " much less to clean with kegs"? you have to clean all the keg parts, lines, taps, etc.
Not every time.
When a keg kicks, I just leave it in the fridge until I a) need it for another batch, or b) have a couple to clean at once.
When it's time to clean the keg, I vent it, remove the lid, pour in some hot water and swirl it around, then dump it to get the bulk of any remaining yeast or trub. I then pour in a couple gallons of hot OxyClean solution, put the lid back on, and give the keg a good shake. I dump it out, pour in a couple gallons of clean, hot water, seal it up and shake again to rinse. I dump, then give it one more hit with clean hot water to make sure I've gotten all the OxyClean residue. Finally, I dump out the water and pour in a couple quarts of StarSan. Seal it up one last time, shake it up good, and hit it with 10 psi of CO2. I then connect a spare beverage line and drain a quart of the StarSan out through it (to sanitize inside the pickup tube). The keg then goes into storage until I need it. The whole routine takes maybe 10 minutes.
Every few (5?) batches, I might do the full deep-cleaning routine. In that case, I simply disassemble the whole keg and throw all the parts inside, then fill it up to the brim with a hot OxyClean solution and let everything soak overnight. The next day, I rinse everything, replace any O-rings that are looking worn, lube everything up with keg lube, reassemble, sanitize, pressurize, and set it aside until it's needed.
My serving lines get flushed with hot water using one of those modified 1 gallon sprayers. My taps get flushed with StarSan now and then, for example once I've cleaned/sanitized/pressurized a keg, I might hook it up to my kegerator and draw some more StarSan from the keg, through the tap.
It's nothing at all like cleaning, rinsing, and sanitizing 48 bottles, one by one.
I just store clean bottles, so I sanitize & fill, bottling bucket & filler.
Same here, my kegs are stored already sanitized. Kegging day consists of:
- Tossing my autosiphon and a piece of foil into my bucket of StarSan.
- Selecting an empty keg, purging the CO2 pressure, removing the lid, throwing it into the bucket of StarSan.
- Dumping out any remaining StarSan from the keg.
- Draping the output end of the autosiphon into the keg, then removing the airlock from the carboy (I store them already elevated on a counter top after primary fermentation winds down so I don't have to disturb them on kegging day), inserting the autosiphon, and giving it a pump.
- After the beer has started flowing, I take the sanitized foil and loosely cover the mouth of the keg just to keep random airborne stuff from floating in. I might also hook up the CO2 tank and give it a couple bursts of CO2 while it's filling, to minimize oxidation.
- As the beer level drops, I adjust the height of the autosiphon. To kill time (it takes 5 minutes or so, I haven't yet sprung for the wide-bore autosiphon), I take a Q-tip and some keg lube, and lube up the main O-ring on the keg's lid.
- Once all the beer is in the keg, I pop the lid back on, pressurize the keg, pull the pressure relief valve 5 times to purge any oxygen, then put the keg in a temperature-controlled freezer on CO2 to chill and carb up.
- Clean the autosiphon and carboy, but you'd have to do that too (in addition to your bottling bucket).
Kegging a batch of beer in this way takes me at the very most, 15 minutes. How long does it take to bottle 5 gallons of beer?
And pay for itself in a few hundred batches? Caps cost a couple bucks per bag of 144. That's like 3 batches worth.
That was a joke.
And good racking process means no more than a dusting on the bottom of the bottle.
Still enough to make the beer hazy for the uninitiated who just dump the whole thing in a glass like any other beer.
A kegging system can cost around a grand new with a 3-tap kegerator, kegs, regulators, lines, etc. Cool & compact, but not cheap. Buy used, get less time ( in theory) before breakdown can occur.
You don't need to get that fancy. A couple of kegs, a CO2 tank and regulator, a temperature controlled freezer, and a few hoses and connectors can get you started for less than $500.
To be honest, the main reason I moved to kegging was because I was unsatisfied with the consistency of the carbonation of my beers. Some would be overcarbed, some would be disappointingly undercarbed, with no way to correct it. Kegging allows me to adjust the carbonation level to whatever I want. It also allows me to completely protect my beer from oxidation at every stage of the process, whereas bottling introduces at least a small amount of oxidation.
