Bottling from warm/cool keg at pressure: tips?

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bingggo

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Hi folks,

I started thinking about how to most easily bottle from a warm keg on a budget (I have no keg fridge, or beeg gun) for hopefully reasonably long-lived well-carbed non-oxidised beer, which led to me wonder a few things; particularly any improvements to how I now bottle from a keg around 12 degrees. People may think 'why the hell are you doing it that way' so I would appreciate any constructive criticism :)

Firstly, to bottle from a 20 degree Celsius keg, I knew CO2 would come out of solution rapidly and foam in the bottle. After reading the keg-to-keg pressurised transfer thread, I tried a keg-to-bottle transfer the same way. That is:
- leave the keg at the normal pressure (about 30psi given it was 20 degrees), with the gas on to maintain that pressure.
- attach a carbonation cap with silicone dip tube to a PET bottle (so the tube is at the bottom of the bottle), and pressurise the bottle to the same pressure as the keg (30 psi).
- attach a beer line from the keg to the bottle and loosen the carbonation cap slightly - CO2 in the bottle escapes slowly, beer flows in without foaming.
- remove carbonation cap from bottle
- squeeze bottle slightly to bring foam level to top of bottle (to minimise oxygen), attach normal cap while squeezed
- fill next bottle.

The catch with the above is releasing the carb cap to attach a normal cap creates a sudden de-gas of the bottle with a degree of foaming and slight foam/beer spillage... but not to bad - maybe a tablespoon at worst. The beer appeared to hold carb level well after a few days in the fridge.

To avoid the foaming, however, I have tried cooling the keg as much as possible in a bin filled with ice water. Unless I want to make or buy a lot of ice, this gets it to maybe 12 degrees after a few hours; at which point the head pressure is still close to 30psi. However, at that temp, minimal CO2 seems to come out the beer when changing caps while repeating the process above. There is essentially no foaming when replacing the carb cap with a normal cap. There seemed no compelling reason to reduce head pressure other than saving a bit of gas when pressuring the bottles perhaps (but I guess depressurising the keg mean more CO2 would come out of solution in the keg itself, leading to lesser carb levels in your bottles).

There is something I wonder about in the method above: whether the carb cap (having been used to fill the bottle with beer) could contaminate the gas disconnect when attached to the next bottle and then to the gas line for pressurisation. I used sanitiser spray on the carb cap and disconnects each time, and kept the gas on... not sure if that's enough.

Anyway, thought this may be of interest or amusement to some and look forward to any comments.

Cheers,
B
 
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