I found this article a little while back and
knew this was right up my alley. I have a 5 keg kegerator and when I have brews
ready to keg, I have to time them just right so I don’t have them stacked up
waiting. I don’t bottle my beer, I prefer the keg. It seems I usually have
about 1 gallon left in a couple of my kegs when it’s time to keg another beer;
so I figured I would bottle that amount to free up a keg. I searched around the
internet and found this article and tried it out. My only concern was how long
would the beer stay in a bottle with carbonation and would the taste be off
after a certain amount of time. I purchased 1 liter EZ-cap bottles and followed
the guidance from the article below. I filled up 12 bottles from a few
different flavors and tried the beer after a month and it was fine. I now use
this method all the time to free up kegs. Thanks brew-dudes.
There are lots of posts on the web about how
to fill bottles from a keg of beer. The most popular gear heady way to do it is
to buy a counter pressure bottle filler or use a beer gun. The beer gun seems a
little easy to use.
However, I only bottle the occasional 6-pack
or so from the keg and I’d rather spend my money on malt and hops than a beer
gun. What follows is a short step-by-step of how I fill bottles from my keg
with stuff I have around the brewery.
Filling from a Keg:
- Keg of beer must be chilled and carbonated. I like to
over carbonate by a few tenths (0.2) of a volume of CO2 to compensate for
lost CO2. (some of that lost CO2 is a good thing as I’ll state later)
- I use a black Cobra/Picnic tap to dispense the beer
from. I modify the tap into a filler by using a piece of tubing that will
stick right over the spout of the tap (usually 3/8 ID tubing). The length
of the tubing need only be long enough to reach the bottle of the bottle.
- I chill down the bottles I plan to fill. This reduces
CO2 loss and foaming.
- Right before I am ready to bottle (bottles and caps
washed and sanitized), I dial down the CO2 on my regulator to zero PSI,
then I burp the keg to release all the head pressure.
- I put the tap with tubing filler into my first bottle
and pull the trigger. Then I slowly dial up the regulator until I have
just enough pressure to get the beer flowing at a decent rate. But not too
fast to get excessive foaming. This can be a little tricky to manage the
regulator and the bottle filler at the same time. But once you get the
pressure set and the beer flowing; that’s it with fussing over the
regulator settings.
- Fill the rest of my bottles and cap them. Getting a
little foam while filling is a good thing as it helps to purge out the
ambient air and O2. This minimizes oxidation of the beer after bottling.
- Once all the bottles are filled I reset the pressure on
the regulator to my normal carbonating and dispensing pressure to keep the
beer from going flat.
This method works good for all sizes of
bottles just as long as your tubing reaches the bottom of the bottle. And it’s
certainly cheaper than purchasing a beer gun.
