Secondary Fermentation In A Garden Sprayer

[oldmacdonald]

I've put off starting to brew for way too long and have resolved to do it now. I haven't collected all the kegging equipment yet and won't have disposable cash to do so for months so thinking about potential work-arounds.

I've collected enough bottles to bottle the beer, but I was planning on making a couple of garden sprayer kegs anyway eventually so thinking about making them now as they're pretty cheap.

Question is, will a garden sprayer hold enough pressure to secondary ferment? I would probably add all the carbonation sugar in bulk to the fermenter before bottling/sprayer kegging.

 

[Wolfy]

UK home brewers use plastic keg/casks to to carbonate and serve their beer, they look pretty much like a garden sprayer only a bit bigger.
However, if you read TB's PDF files (linked from his garden sprayer build post) you'll see that getting anything other than a low level of UK-type carbonation would be hard/impossible when using a garden sprayer to naturally carbonate the beer.
The sprayer should hold the pressure fine, but make sure the pressure-relief valve is working correctly since the amount of dissolved CO2 depends on the temperature and you don't want to warm it up and create a bottle-bomb.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

If you ferment using a proper lager yeast so that it will still tick over at say 9 or 10 degrees, then you will be able to get a pretty well conditioned beer in a sprayer, assuming of course that you cindition it at those low temps. Much warmer than that and the pressure relief will (or certainly should) let gas out at too low a pressure for normal carbonation.

 

[seemax]

I was sick of bottling and didn't want to invest in a full keg rig so I ended up going with a keg charger.

I got ball lock 2nd hand kegs for $60 , a CO2 charger + MFL disconnect for $40 , disconnect+beer line+tap for $20.

CO2 bulbs can be had cheaply in bulk online ... about $1.50 per 16g bulb.

Sure it means I can't force carb, but given I don't drink *that* much I'm happy to wait to 2-3 weeks. Also means the beer-on-tap is portable!

 

[Nodrog]

I was sick of bottling and didn't want to invest in a full keg rig so I ended up going with a keg charger.

I got ball lock 2nd hand kegs for $60 , a CO2 charger + MFL disconnect for $40 , disconnect+beer line+tap for $20.

CO2 bulbs can be had cheaply in bulk online ... about $1.50 per 16g bulb.

Sure it means I can't force carb, but given I don't drink *that* much I'm happy to wait to 2-3 weeks. Also means the beer-on-tap is portable!

Would be interested in this set up as a prelim to kegging, but not too familiar with the bits. Any links you coudl share?
cheers

 

[seemax]

Sure... using beerbelly as an example but you can find these bits from most good LHBS.

http://www.beerbelly.com.au/kegging.html

You'll need to ball lock disconnects, GAS IN and BEER OUT. The picnic tap setup has the beer out, and keg CO2 charger has the gas in.

Fill your keg, prime with approx half sugar (I just used 70g dex), seal and leave it for 2 weeks at least at 20C. Hook up your beer line and pour some beers. Shoot some CO2 into the keg as required to dispense.

Lot as simple as a CO2 cylinder... but it does the job for much less investment!

 

[Bribie G]

I used plastic pressure barrels in the UK and they were the dux nuts for draught bitters. However keg priming would only get you half the way, and about half way through the barrel you need to start using the gas charger (which comes with the UK models and uses sparklets bulbs).
Also with the garden sprayer you would need a gas source, but for a BBQ / party etc then the air-pump would be fine to dispense all the beer on one day.

The main reason that pressure barrels have never caught on in Australia is that in the UK it's easy to keep them at say 13 degrees in the garage etc except for the 36 hours of summer, but being short and fat they are really not suitable for our fridge setups.