I need to bottle some beer from a keg. Can I just dispense beer into the bottle from the keg and cap it? Any tips or suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
You can do that but the carbonation won’t last long. There are commercial units that work well, but I’m cheap…I use one of these…Wayback Machinehttp://www.strangebrew.ca/Drew/cheap.html
Seat the stopper and start to fill the bottle. Soon the pressure will build up and stop the flow. At that point, very slightly crack the stopper to restart the flow.
That is awesome. I bookmarked it for future reference. Cheap is wonderful. I’m thinking about getting a keg setup with the money I got for my gluten free article and being able to bottle some of each batch would be great.
Nice Denny thanks for posting that link. Ive been over flowing the bottles to push out O2 then cap. Would you still have to do that with this setup?
You can let the foam rise an them cap them. You can also purge the bottles with co2. Use cold bottles. If they’re wet from sanitizing that’s ok. Cold and wet minimizes foaming.
+1. And filling with no more than 4 psi (after venting the keg) helps minimize excessive foaming. Excessive foaming = more carb loss. Chilling your beer gun/filler as well as the bottles helps, too, as does chilling the beer colder than normal.
I used a homemade rig like that for about a year, and it does work. Then it started creating tons of foam and not working very well. I was wasting a ton of beer and ending up with major carbonation loss. I bought the bullet and bought a Beergun - and it has been awesome! What an improvement. Shortly after I bought my beergun, I saw that Northern Brewer came out with their own version which has the added bonus of bottling at serving pressures, so you don’t have to dial back the psi on the regulator like you do with the Beergun. I haven’t used the NB version, but I do love my Beergun.
If you want to take beer to a party then a carbonator is awesome.
I just shoot a bit of CO2 in them first. I’ve had beers bottled this way win in comps so it DOES work.
The beauty of that stopper method is that the bottles fil so slowly I don’t get foam in them.
At 4psi I get very little foam either, Denny.
What do you use to shoot co2 into the bottle?
I use flare (screw on) QDs so I just unscrew one and stick the end of the hose in the bottle.
Thanks, good idea.