Practicing with new kegs until brews are ready

[Bridges]

I know buckleys beer in healesville kegs into corny's that they then dispense at events and you can hire kegs/buy beer for your party. They may be worth contacting to find out if they'd fill your keg.

 

[Bridges]

So Carnie have you used the fridge in anger (or thirst) yet?

 

[carniebrew]

I'll go with thirst....I tried a few options for getting commercial beer into a keg, but nothing panned out.

I was wanting to both learn about carbonation, as well as test my system for leaks etc, so I went with a keg full of water. Chilled it, attached the co2 at 30psi, and rocked it under foot for 10 minutes or so. Backed it off to 10psi, and voila, soda water. A bit undercarbed after just the rocking, but carbed nonetheless. Left it at 10psi for a day or so, and it was perfect. Kids are loving the instant fizzy drink machine dad has on the back deck. Bit of cordial in a cup, fill with soda water, and they told me "you're epic dad". Ok they might have said "that's epic dad", but same same.

Even made the missus a non-alcoholic version of her favourite elderflower & lime cider on a hot day recently, and got the nod of approval. Mind you I told her the whole setup cost about half what it really did, and she still gave me that "do you really need that?" look...so I still have some work to do there... h34r:

My Kolsch is on day 6 of fermentation, and almost at FG, so it should be in the keg by Sunday night for lagering. Will probably taste ordinary for the first few weeks, but at least I'll have beer coming out of a tap! Will brew a hefe on the weekend so that should come up to speed pretty quickly.

 

[carniebrew]

Ok, first beer kegged! Crash chilled the Kolsch in a secondary for a couple of days. Starsan'd the keg (cleaned 'em all when I got 'em). Then heated/mixed up some gelatin, poured that in the keg, and racked on top of it via a 12mm silicon hose. Keg set to 30psi, although there's no hurry to carb it given it badly needs lagering (that Kolsch yeast can stink up a treat).

Gotta say, even for someone who didn't mind bottling, how farken easy is kegging? :super:

 

[TidalPete]

Congrats on your new kegging setup Carnie but you should be aware that if you add the gelatine in the keg, every time you shift those 3 kegs around then you'll be stirring up the gelatine in the bottom resulting in cloudy gelatine-tasting beers.
Been there- done that.
Much better to add the gelatine to fermenter after cold crashing & leaving it all behind in fermenter when you keg.
If planning on farming the yeast, rack to secondary, cold crash, then gelatine leaving the yeast in primary for farming
Hope this helps?

 

[carniebrew]

Cheers, I have read about that, but my kegerator, and the keg with the Kolsch in it, won't be moving for quite a while, and from what I read (which is not to say it's necessarily true), after a couple of days at 2C the gelatin will have clumped everything in the bottom of my keg, and my first pour should remove it all?

I used 1tsp of gelatin with 100ml of water, using Screwy's method from an old post on AHB.

I was tempted to pour the gelatin into the secondary in which the Kolsch was crash chilling, but figured racking onto it in the keg might be better than stirring up the secondary.

 

[evildrakey]

I sterilise my keg well, add 4 bottles of Bickfords Peach Tea Cordial and then top it up with water.

Everybody loves the stuff. It's very very refreshing and even looks like a beer and pours a head...

 

[carniebrew]

Thought I'd try the Kolsch again this morning as it's had about 36 hours at 30psi. Vented the keg, backed the reg off to 12psi, and poured myself a beer. This was the result:



That was with the flow control fully open...a thick, creamy head that lasted quite a while. Beer's still a bit raw obviously, so I'll give it a few weeks to lager before tucking in (sampling occasionally of course!).

Just curious, while lagering, does it make any difference if I leave the gas connected or not? I assume now it's carbonated and the headspace is all co2, I can just disconnect the gas and only hook it back up when I want to pour, right?

It just struck me too that I should have asked if I need to lager before carbonating, google results seem to suggest it doesn't matter much?

 

[DJ_L3ThAL]

I havent disconnectee the gas to lager it. People lager in bottles so guess that says it all.

Some people even just d/c the gas until the keg starts pouring slow, then give headspace another charge and turn off again.