I tried this again last night (it’s been several years since I last attempted to bottle from a keg). Purging went ok… I guess… hard to say. As for filling, after the bottle filled 1/3 way with the stopper in, I gently cracked it, but then I got a lot of foam and overflow. I played around with releasing the keg pressure, turning off the CO2, etc. The bottles eventually filled (the overflow went into a clean bucket and after this exercise, I poured the overflow into a cup to enjoy it) but I feel like I’m missing something. It’s possible the line from the keg to the picnic tap was too short (ca. 4 feet) - I have been using a device called Picnic Tap 2.1 for dispensing for a couple years now (very happy with it too), so I don’t normally dispense with the traditional QD-tubing-picnic tap, which I built from spare parts specifically to try bottling from a keg once more via this method. Edit: I also kept everything cold (I chilled all the bottles and equipment in the fridge, and was bottling in a chilly garage).
I ended up getting the TapCooler w/ the bottle holder and keg adapter. Sooooo Much easier to fill bottles from keg now.
Food for thought: Bryan Rabe, the Low Ox guru, has a video where he plumbs a dissolved oxygen meter into his can filling contraption. According to his data, it takes a 45 sec purge of CO2 to get to zero O2 in the can. Granted, that’s a 16 oz can vs a 12 oz bottle but the premise is: That’s a lot longer than most previously thought.
Another data point: one of the big breweries (I forget which one) filled bottles from a keg using a beer gun then checked them w/ a lab grade DO meter. The bottles filled with a CO2 purge and capped on foam were exponentially lower in O2 than those filled w/o CO2 purge and not capped on foam.
I fill directly from the Picnic Tap 2.1. I just put an approximately 12” piece of flexible silicone tubing on the little lip of the picnic tap and very carefully insert that tube into the bottle and turn on the tap. The lip is tiny and the tubing can come off but surprisingly it usually stays.
I don’t send beers to competitions that way just growler fils and quick bottles for parties.
Thank you for sharing that! I’ll give that a try. All I really need at the moment (maybe forever) is a way to bring beer for tastings at club meetings–though who knows, maybe I will eventually want to bottle beer and gift it or whatever, and then Tapcooler here I come. For a decade, the only person who ever tasted my beer was me. Sharing beer has introduced wrinkles.
Edit: after posting this I remembered (like a kid remembering a hard homework assignment they had forgotten) that recently I said sure, I will enter the next quarterly club competition. So I have about six to eight weeks to really bottle-bottle.
It’s amazing how in life (not just homebrewing) some tasks are so easy and others so hard and it often doesn’t break down the way I think it will.
