I brewed a saison, which was kegged and force carbonated several weeks ago. The longer this beer sits the better it gets. So, I was curious what would happen if it sat for a few months, but obviously I need the keg for more beer!
I could just bottle from the tap and overfill it to hopefully purge most of the oxygen, but I’m not sure this would work if my plan is to store for months.
What would happen if I let a bottle of the beer warm up, off-gassed it, added priming sugar and re-capped it? This is a dry saison and it is already highly carbonated (3ish)…am I headed for a basement-bomb?
I think I’m gonna brew this beer again in the future, and try keg conditioning it instead of force carbing, that way I can bottle a few from there and let them sit.
You could allow the beer to warm up to room temp in the keg and burb the keg over a week to get the carbonation down to something in the 1.5-2 v/v. Make a sugar solution designed to provide 1-1.5 v/v in 1 1 tsp and then fill bottles with beer and 1 tsp of sugar solution. The exact details would need some fine tuning.
I haven’t had the best luck trying to bottle right from the tap. The last time I did, a large amount of the carbonation was lost. That was even with turning down the PSI during the pour, using one of those growler filling tubes, and chilling the bottles ahead of time.
You could try bottling the kegged beer with some additional sugar, but I think there’s a lot of variables. As mentioned, one is reducing the carbonation of the kegged beer. But there will also be more CO2 loss when you actually transfer the beer to bottles. It might be difficult to estimate how much sugar you need to add. You’ll also want to make sure you stir the batch up so any remaining yeast is suspended in the beer again. This could work, but if you’re enjoying the beer I would be concerned with something going wrong.
If you think this is something you might want to do again in the future, you can look into getting a bottle filler to hook up to your keg. I use the Last Straw bottle filler and am pretty happy with it. Then even if you decide you want to bottle an entire batch, you can still force carbonate.
If the beer is already carbonated well in the keg and you go to bottle it now from the tap your beer will oxidize in the bottle pretty quickly (ie 3-4 wks kept cold). If you have a beer gun or Counter pressure filler, you might get a longer period of time of “freshness”.
At this stage in the game, bottling the beer with fresh sugar will do nothing as the yeast will not consume that excess sugar now that they have most likely dropped out of suspension and are dormant. I would definitely not go this route.
If it tastes great in the keg, just drink it up as is and get another batch brewed. Meanwhile get another keg (or 4)!!