Since I recently switched to kegs and I have only one chest freezer available, I have to ferment a lager (my first one, a Dortmunder Export) and serve my beer side by side. For a 10 liter batch would it be sufficient to do the following (from Ferment in a Cornelius Keg - Brew Your Own):
For fermentation, remove the gas side’s short dip tube. Attach the “Gas In” disconnect to the “in” post on the keg. Now slip the tubing onto the hose barb of the disconnect. Fill your jar or growler about half full with a solution of the sanitizer of your choice. Insert the other end of the tubing in the growler and you’re ready to go.
and even not do the blowoff at all?
And if I want to collect the yeast, can I simply do this by means of forcing CO2 through the keg after primary fermentation, and collect the first few messy pints?
This has become my go to method lately. It’s pretty basic, the only thing they don’t mention is you have to take the guts out of the gas in connect which only takes a minute with a screwdriver. I then run a tube from the barb to a growler of starsan.
The benefits to me are steel doesn’t break like glass or scratch like plastic, I can get my whole arm in their to scrub it down, and it’s narrow shape allows me to fit two at a time in my secondary freezer (which would only hold one carboy). I always just rack off the yeast but have been meaning to try shortening the dip tube and just using a keg jumper to do everything without exposing the beer to the atmosphere.
If the lid of your corny has a pressure relief valve it might safely vent the pressure, but it isn’t wise to rely on it as the primary way to prevent the keg from exploding.
When I ferment in a corny keg I neither remove the gas in dip tube nor the guts of the gas in disconnect.
You can just attach the gas disconnect to the keg and attach some tubing to the disconnect (put the other end of the tubing into a jar of sanitizer).
If you are only fermenting 10 liters in a 5 gallon keg, you shouldn’t have any issues with blowoff. The gas will vent through the disconnect.
If you build a jumper cable, you can use CO2 to rack beer from the fermentor keg into your serving keg. Some yeast and other trub near the bottom of the liquid out tube will come out first, and you’ll want to direct that into another vessel before redirecting the flow into the serving keg.
In my experience, the majority of the yeast, etc. will remain in the fermentor keg until you get down to the last bit of beer.
IME, it’s about a 50-50 regarding whether you can push yeast slurry through a cornie post. It does seem to work out fine for powdery strains, but with something highly flocculent you could have issues.
At ~100 psi, the bigger issue might be CO2 toxicity.
Either that or ending up with a beer carbed to 5+ vol.
Narcout - Interesting, I wonder what was different with you leaving everything intact - when I tried that initially there was still pressure in the keg building up (as in I’d have to vent it). Removing the guts allowed all the C02 to escape easily.
You need the keg post poppet valve in place to press against the poppet valve in the disconnect, otherwise the valve in the disconnect will remain closed.
You might need the dip tube in place in order for the keg post poppet valve to seat correctly, but I’m not positive about that - easy enough to test though.
Awesome, so really all you do is leave everything intact and hook a disconnect with a barb/tubing to the keg?
I would prefer that since it makes it easier to use C02 to transfer out of the fermenting keg or use the corny as as serving keg without breaking out the wrench to reassemble
What I do, when I ferment in a keg and harvest, is have my liquid tube bent a tad so it sits off the bottom of the keg a couple inches. This will leave behind a 1/4 to 1/2 gallon, which should be plenty for most beers to leave trub and yeast behind. After the closed transfer is complete, I’ll swirl the keg and pour off the yeast into jars. Just sanitize the outside of the keg really well before pouring off into jars.
And Narcout already covered it. All you need is a gas disconnect with a piece of tubing going into a jar of sanitizer for blow off.
You don’t want to ferment, say, 4.75 gallons of a Belgian blond in a keg though. It will clog the blow off and you’ll have a serious mess on your hands. Ask me how I know this…
You also don’t want to make the assumption that a lacto ferment isn’t going to produce much CO2 pressure and skip the blowoff/spunding valve. And definitely don’t just hook up a tap to the liquid out to take a pH sample in that case. Unless you want to take the sample from your floor/wall/ceiling/pants/etc.
The blow off clogged, so I’m thinking, “Okay, I need to remove the post and put a bigger blow off on there.” Cool. Take the post off. About 2 seconds after I removed it the yeast just exploded out of the keg, 6 feet into the air for about 5 seconds. I couldn’t believe it. I wish I’d gotten it on video. The beer turned out awesomely though, even if I only got 3.5 gallons out of the 4.75 gallon batch.
