Using nitrogen for transfers in brewery

[tll77]

Does anybody use nitrogen vs co2 to move beer from one vessel to another?

Are there any reasons why I wouldn't want to use nitrogen for moving beer from fermenter to keg or out of the brite tank to a keg?

I have done it several times and haven't noticed any issues in the beers, but it dawned on me to ask if anyone else out there has done it. I have only used this so far to transfer uncarbonated beer, then I force carb in the keg.

I have also used this to purge kegs before transfer. Also, any reason I shouldn't do this?

Could I use this to move carbonated beer from unitank to keg?

 

[Dland]

Don't know, except nitrogen costs more than CO2, and there would normally be a tank of CO2 around anyway all rigged up with fittings.

If it is all you have around to power your transfers, probably be fine. Not sure I'd want to "carbonate" with it. There are some stouts and such that are N charged, of course.

 

[ehk089]

I don’t have a nitro system, but I know it costs a lot more for beer gas than co2...

 

[tll77]

In my situation, nitrogen is actually cheaper than co2, and while I do have co2 tanks around the smallest is a ten pounder. However, I have several small nitrogen tanks and they are aluminum, so even full they seem to weigh nothing.

I don't carbonate with it(well, you can't but...) I force carb with co2.

 

[Horseflesh]

If it’s cheap for you, I can’t see any harm.

 

[Vale71]

Besides N2 being more dangerous than CO2 since you can't smell it, the only issue would be if you replaced headspace gas completely with N2. The partial pressure of CO2 would then drop to zero and your beer would lose some CO2 until it reaches equilibrium again. Depending on the headspace to beer volume ratio this might be more or less noticeable in the beer. If you take care to immediately purge the headspace of N2 then you should have no issues, purging could cause you to use so much CO2 though that it begs the question of whether you've really used up less CO2 at the end. You could of course leave the N2 in the headspace and just add CO2 as needed, this would however increase total pressure and might be an issue when serving the beer.

 

[@RoyalGallon]

Just for interest at the first brewery I worked at we routinely used N2 to flush conditioned beer and strip the dissolved O2 out of it. Once we'd got that down below specification we'd then put CO2 on to get back in spec for carbonation.
Obviously when you flush with N2 you displace all the dissolved gasses so you lose the DO2 and the CO2 from your beer.