I could use your help here guys. Mike and I are kegging for the very first time this Friday night. Any tips, tricks, suggestions? Would love to hear from you!
Rick
Sorry it's a day late, but here are some tips:
1. Try to chill down the beer before racking to the keg. It'll help settle out the yeast and will be easier for the CO2 to dissolve into soution.
2. After sealing the keg, vent via the release valve with the gas on to purge the oxygen in the headspace. Or, purge the keg before racking.
3. If you want pinpoint carbonation levels, check out a carb chart for temps and pressure. Or, jus crank the psi to 25 and let sit for two days, vent, then adjust to serving pressure for a general carb.
4. Different lengths of beer lines require different psi levels to serve properly. You can do a search for "balancing draft beer lines" to find formulas/guidelines.
5. Once sealed, you may want to check your keg for slow leaks at the seals. Sometimes you can hear them, but the old soapy water trick works, too.
How did it go? Any problems/issues that you encountered? Also, the forward sealing faucets like Ventmatic and Perlick are awesome. Cheers...
As always, make sure you're drinking craft beer while kegging...wouldn't want to upset the beer gods ![]()
Sorry I didn't reply earlier (started to and dropped connection...)
How did it go?
So the kegging was a true learning experience for us. Our kegorator came with a standard American sankey style tap so we had to rig up a quick release system that would enable us to swithc between the corny kegs and the sankey kegs. It took us a while to hook it all up but we finally managed to do it. Now we can easily switch back and forth between the two. We also had purchase an adaptor fitting for our 2.5 pound Co2 tank. That wasn't bad.
The actual kegging was fine. We cleaned the crap out of our kegs with oxi clean, water, and 5 star including all of the fittings and gaskets etc. We pump syphoned the beer into each keg and added our priming sugar and sealed them up. Hooked up the Belgian Strong and let her rip....and wa la...we discovered a Co2 leak somewhee around our Home Depot purchased fitting. OK. So the next day we went back to the beer store with our Co2 tubing, fittings and our Co2 tank and we quickly discovered that all we needed was a 25 cent little gasket that we had purchased but lost the day before. Took it hom set it up and no leak. After a few minutes of adjusting the PSI on our Co2 beer, OUR BEER, actually came out of the keg!!! We had a couple of small leaks around some fittings which we tightened up and from that moment on it was perfect.
So, a small learnign curve with a huge payoff. The beer is still conditoining and carbonating. On a different note, what has your guys' experience been with force carbonation? How does it work?
Oh, I'll have pics up real soon so you can see how we have it set up.
Rick
Hah! Nice lesson I learned too. I ruined two part full kegs after our party due to losing that little guy (the white ring).
As for force carbing - it works very well - especially if you are in a hurry. You have to be careful or you will over carb it if you are quick carbing it. Otherwise, no sugar just hook up to serving PSI +1 and leave it alone for 10-14 days at that pressure. It has to be chilled - it's pretty tough force carbing at room temp or more - so that's the only real hassle. After that period, you're ready to go - no fuss or mess.
Now your next step will be to secondary condition in the kegs, and possibly carb from secondary (spunding). If done right, no sugar, no or little CO2 for force carbing! It worked really well on my Helles served at the party (too well). Basically, when primary fermentation is 90% done, you rack to the keg and seal it up with a small pressure of CO2 ( I hit it with about 6 PSI). Then I let it finisht the ferment, all while building up CO2 (there's no release). You have to watch it or buy a spunding valve/DYI valve to not allow it to build up too much pressure, but otherwise no attention needed. Then jump it to a new keg to avoid the remaining residue (push with CO2 at around 2-3 PSI tops) and you're ready to serve once chilled!
are you supposed to add priming sugar to the keg? i thought that step was eliminated with the forced carbonation??? i want to go Keg some day.
Forced carbonation is great. While there are many arguments back and forth about natural carbonization with sugar and forced carbonization, the conveniance vs the minute difference in flavor is worth it.
I use the 5 gallon Cornelius kegs. I rack from primary to a Corny for secondary fermentation, then use CO2 to push from secondary to final. Its pretty cool. Then turn set it to 20 PSI. If you want to make it go faster, vigorously shake the keg every day for a few minutes.
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