When transferring a heavily hopped beer into a purged keg, is there any way to prevent the aroma loss that happens when you have to vent the receiving keg to keep beer flowing?
Is this an application for a spunding valve in that the pressure maintained would hold the aroma in better even though it’s still releasing pressure?
I’ve just begun doing the following to save CO2 and for safety reasons (exploding glass carboy). This might help.
1 Depressurize the keg.
2. Connect the gas post of the keg to the carboy.
3. Start a siphon from the carboy
4. Connect the hose with the siphone to the liquid post.
While this can’t eliminate the loss of aroma in the keg, it can reduce the loss of aroma in the carboy as a headspace forms.
While there is nothing you can do short of pushing with a higher pressure than the serving vessel contains(not logical). If you are noticing loss of aroma after you keg look into oxidation.
I’m following LoDo procedures and not necessarily noticing a terrible drop off of aroma but it just smells so good after a transfer that I know I’m losing a lot of aroma. So sounds like not much I can do about that aspect of the transfer then right? One way or another, some aroma is going to escape.
Well if you transfer is gentle not much should leave. The co2 should stay in solution and the aroma with it.
I’m transferring in through the liquid out post…but every time I have to pull the prv to let out CO2 to continue the transfer it smells like what I want my beer to smell like.
Is there something else I can be doing to keep more aroma in solution?
Chilling both vessels and transfer equipment COLD but not frozen prior to transfer should help keep Co2 in solution.
Yeah that could be a part if the problem. I can’t really cold crash my fermenter unless my kegerator happens to be empty which happens never
But unless you can cap your fermenter it is going to suck back air.
If you are following low oxygen aren’t you spunding?
Or are you just Sani-purging the vessel?
Sanipurging at this point. Just got my spund valve setup so next brew I will use that. I don’t ferment in a keg though due to no way to control temp so I ferment in a PET carboy with swamp cooling, transfer to purged keg with some points left or primed if dry hopping.
Cool!
This is what I have started doing with closed transfers. I use a auto- siphon with the hose attaching to a 5/16" barb to 1/4" flare [gas line fitting] on a flare type beer QD on the beer out post. Then I run a line back into top of carboy from a QD on the gas in and wrap the neck of carboy with foil. You could see the co2 running back into the carboy per sanitizer bubbles going up the line.
I do incremental temperature drops to reach lagering temp and I have a gas-in fitting on my conical that I use to add CO2 to the vessel periodically. That avoids air ingress to the fermenter.
I have a cask breather that replaces the lost volume during cooling with CO2. Works great.
A cask breather sounds great, but that is a lot of money ($100).
LP regulator hack. I’ve been meaning to do this so I can crash in the fermenter again. I used solid stoppers in my better bottles, but my new fermonsters do not like vacuum at all (lack of ribs = lack of rigidity)
I like cask beers and for me it was available and quite utile. Now I can justify the original $ by dual purposing it.