What is the best way to only bottle a six pack or so from a full batch? I am taking the batch to my friends to keg for a New Year’s party but want some for myself in order to get good tasting notes, etc.
I am thinking about transferring the full batch to the bottling bucket and adding priming sugar as normal then bottling enough to get the remaining volume to 5 gallons. I will have to clean and sanitize the fermenting bucket then transfer back to it for transportation. I don’t have a lid for the bottling bucket… The 5 gallons will be transferred to keg and conditioned in a fridge so I don’t think the priming sugar will affect much. Is this a bad idea? I think it will be easier than measuring an amount of priming sugar for such a small amount of beer. I could see having difficulty with the final product’s carb.
Coopers carb drops work pretty well for me. For 1-gallon batches I don’t generally use a bottling bucket. I just attach my bottling wand to my autosiphon and bottle straight from the fermenter, then add one carb drop to each bottle.
If your sanitation is good, then you could do this to bottle a few right from your fermenter without having to transfer a whole batch to the bottling bucket.
I have heard of inconsistent results with Coopers drops, but have always had good luck with Muntons. Four of these aspirin-sized pills in a 12 ounce bottle has worked for me.
Of course if you have kegging equipment you could always force carbonate some in a 2-liter plastic bottle.
All good ideas. I can only measure down to whole grams so I am not sure if that would be accurate enough. It looks like it would be about 2.21 g of table sugar per bottle according to what I normally do. I could do 2 g per bottle and just accept that it will be a little off.
Here’s an old pharmacy trick. Weigh out the full amount needed for the entire batch. Spread it out into an even rectangle, then use a ruler to divide that rectangle into even sections for each beer you’re bottling. This should help boost your accuracy a bit.
You could put it all in a bottling bucket, add priming sugar, bottle a few and drain the rest into the keg. Let the bottled and kegged beer condition. Good to go.
That was kind of my original idea. The main thing is I want to get the bottling over with before I go over there due to a time crunch. In this instance I would have to transfer back to a cleaned and sanitized fermentation bucket for transportation since I somehow lost the lid for the bottling bucket.
I think I may have talked myself into this option even though it is probably more complicted than necessary. I think this makes sense due mainly to timing.
Okay, here is a compromise that I think will work alot better. Get the keg from your friend, transfer the whole amount of beer into the keg with the priming sugar and bottle the uncarbed beer from the keg. just force it out with minimal co2. then let the keg and the bottles condition.
I’m surprised nobody has thrown out the idea of force carbing the entire keg, then just bottling from it. You can do it as simply as a bottling wand stuffed into a picnic tap with the springy bit removed. I have a beer gun, but for 6 bottles or so its not worth breaking it out. I do this all the time.
Advantages are clearer beer in the bottles (no sediment), you know the carb level, and it’s faster.
My buddy convinced me to come over, transfer 1 gallon for bottling and the rest to the keg. I should get about 10 bottles to condition and consume independently. I calculated needing 24 g of table sugar for priming which should yield more consistency than I was planning. The keg will end up with less than 5 gallons but there will be 3 other beers on tap that night so it shouldn’t be a big deal.
