I’m relatively new to kegging. It seems such an obvious question to me but I’ve not seen this addressed anywhere so I figured I’d ask. In bottling you add sugar to each bottle to eventually carbonate the beer. With kegging, the carbonation is accomplished via CO2 from the tank. So do you add sugar when kegging, or not? If so, when? If not, doesn’t that detract from the flavor and chemical composition of the beer? Thanks in advance!
No, not at all, and you sir are welcome! 
You don’t need to, but you can. Others will correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but I believe it’s called “en cask”. ??
You don’t need to add sugar to the keg if you are using CO2 to carbonate.
You can add sugar to the keg when you fill it with beer, then seal the keg, put it where it is warm and let it carbonate much like you would in a bottle.
I’ve not tried carbonating a keg with sugar so I don’t know if it changes the flavor or chemical composition of the beer versus using CO2 to carbonate.
Using natural carbonation tends to help prevent staling, in my experience. This way, you have yeast actively scrubbing away any oxygen introduced in the headspace, and the beers sits in very pure CO2 until tapped.
Even food grade CO2 will noticeably stale a beer over time.
I’ve been kegging for about 1.5 years and have done both methods pretty much equally. Flavorwise, they’re both good. If I have the time and not doing a lager, I prefer keg conditioning. Mostly because I’m cheap and don’t want to waste CO2.
A couple side notes:
- I cut an inch or so off one of my dip tubes so it wouldn’t pick up too much crud when I keg condition.
- I still give a blast of CO2 to the keg to get a good seal on the lid.
THIS ^^^. Except I think Phil meant to say “very pure CO2”
Fixed, thanks.
I’ve been kegging for 15 years now, and never used priming sugar in my kegs. When I first started, I was told by my LHBS to use 1/3 the priming sugar I normally used for bottling, as the larger vessels needed less priming.
I got a keg in order to be able to force carb; if I were to prime in the keg it would pretty much defeat my purpose for getting it.
I’m getting ready to try half of my batches w priming and CO2. I rarely force carbonate to get my beer ready faster. The oxygen in the CO2 definitely oxidizes the beer over time. I’m going to keg condition all of my Belgians and Saison beers from now on. Anything that is long term will get keg conditioned or bottled from the keg with primed wort.
I know that agitating beer while carbonating can lead to temporarily increased carbonic acid which can be undesirable, but had no idea introducing CO2 into a purged vessel could cause oxidation. Can you point us in the direction of any articles or other documents describing how that works?
Folks here have reported that commercially available CO2 is not 100% pure. The small amount of O2 can cause staling over the long term.
“Can” being the key word there. Many people have never had that problem with commercial CO2.
I think the distinction should be made that people who have started utilizing Low Oxygen methods have seen this issue pop up consistently. It seems to present itself more readily under those conditions.
Not trying to detail further though, sorry.
so a simple solution to the problem is to eliminate low 02 brewing methods…
Ready, set, troll
ETA - I think it’s more to do with people not knowing what they are missing. People like their beer, even under “normal” homebrew processes. Those that are “woke” to the low oxygen processes notice the difference as they are able to pick it out. Similar to tasting cherry after somebody mentions that they taste cherry.
Go figure.
It’s seems that any post, no matter what the topic, somehow turns into a LoDO argument. Haven’t been brewing all that long, and have not tried LoDO yet, but it’s sort of sad this becomes so nasty all the time. It’s beer. Beer=fun. No matter how anyone brews.
To the OP. Try both ways and see what ya like. I always force carb because I want to drink my brew asap. But may try keg conditioning to see if there is a difference.