Kegging, Back To The Basics

[balconybrewer]

hi all,

over the years have treated my kegs in many different ways, never had any disasters but always wondered if i was getting the most from my kegged beers???

once kegged and carbed should i keep it chilled and never let it warm up again, leave to cold condition for a couple of weeks and then drink

or

once kegged and carbed should i let it ward up and condition at room temp for a couple of weeks and then chill a week before drinking????

what does everyone think / do / know??

cheers

 

[raven19]

I am limited to 4 keg capacity in my fridge, but have 5 - 6 of them with beery goodness inside. Hence beers are rotated through as required.

 

[sink cut]

Does anyone add fermentables to a Keg to carbonate it naturally?

I did it with a pilsener about 10 years ago to try and get it to dry out. I was not very happy with the resulting cloudyness or lack of dryness.

I have 60L of clearing Weizen in the fermenter at the moment and was thinking of adding 250g of sugar to one of the Kegs(23L) to make it a Heffe weizen and clear the other one as usual for a Krystall

 

[raven19]

Does anyone add fermentables to a Keg to carbonate it naturally?

I did it with a pilsener about 10 years ago to try and get it to dry out. I was not very happy with the resulting cloudyness or lack of dryness.

I have 60L of clearing Weizen in the fermenter at the moment and was thinking of adding 250g of sugar to one of the Kegs(23L) to make it a Heffe weizen and clear the other one as usual for a Krystall

Generally add about half the normal priming sugar required for bottling when naturally carbing in the keg.

Many on the forum do it this way - I have not yet naturally carbed a beer in the keg though.

 

[Bribie G]

I've done it a couple of times, but really just to save gas. With a keg only being 19L it's disappointing that the stuff doesn't seem to clear out until you have already suffered quarter of a keg of cloudy beer. I only have 4 kegs and rotate through them fairly quickly.
Because I cold condition and fine most brews in 20L (=23 L) Willow cubes I know I am going to get a keg plus 4 bottles every time bang on. So I fill 3 bottles first which gets the beer running crystal clear. Then fill the keg. Then fill the last bottle to take up the slight bit of goop that starts running when I tip the cube. It also allows me a couple of small taster glasses to see how it turned out in secondary :icon_cheers:

I suppose if I had 8 kegs (bulk buy from Ross which I intend to do in the next month - damn my shopping list is getting longer by the day, march pump etc but Kev is stimulating me in a few weeks ) then it would be feasible to have a few kegs of sugar primed ale sitting for a month to really pack hard so they run clear early. Me I don't mind paying the eight bucks or whatever I'd save on gas for the year.

 

[stueywhytcross]

hi all,

over the years have treated my kegs in many different ways, never had any disasters but always wondered if i was getting the most from my kegged beers???

once kegged and carbed should i keep it chilled and never let it warm up again, leave to cold condition for a couple of weeks and then drink

or

once kegged and carbed should i let it ward up and condition at room temp for a couple of weeks and then chill a week before drinking????

what does everyone think / do / know??

cheers

once kegged i keep my kegs cold, but as long as they are stored quite cool i can't see too many problems with keeping them at room temp, however if you doing this to let the yeast "clean up" the beer, why not just longer secondary fermentation?

 

[brando]

My usual practise is to ferment solely in the primary (i.e. no racking to secondary), for about ten days, then crash chill for about 4 days, then keg it and store cold.

So, from the time I start the crash chill, the beer is kept cold constantly until it is drank.

 

[balconybrewer]

sounds like most keep cold once crash chilled for carbing. can anyone else report on any benifits / drawbacks of letting them warm up once carbed cold?

cheers

 

[Bribie G]

sounds like most keep cold once crash chilled for carbing. can anyone else report on any benifits / drawbacks of letting them warm up once carbed cold?

cheers

No benefits as far as I can see. I reckon if most brewers had a cold room, an unlimited supply of kegs and someone to pay the power bills, there would be lots of chokka cold rooms and very few poor lonely kegs kept out in the warm :lol: