I’ve watched a few tutorials so far, and no one has addressed whether I set my carbonation, remove the CO2 tank, and put the keg in the fridge, or if I leave the CO2 tank connected and put it in the fridge with the keg. If this sounds like a stupid question, forgive me–I’ve never done this before.
I leave everything attached for the duration of carbonating, but turn off the tank thereafter, opening only to displace the head space as I draw beer after that. If a leak develops in the system, I don’t lose the tank and at worst, I have some flat or less carbed beer. Cheers!
There are a few ways to do this but I’ll tell you how I do it. I force carb at 30 psi for 24hrs with a separate tank. When ready to tap, I place in the refrigerator and attach to the gas manifold at specified carbonation rate for that style of beer. So yes, leave the tank attached.
Your call really. There’s no right or wrong way. I put the tank in the fridge with the kegs. I leave the hoses attached. Others drill a hole and plumb the tank from outside the fridge.
You need to leave the tank connected until the beer is carbonated. If you’re setting it at the equilibrium pressure, could take up to a couple weeks in my experience.
I’m pretty happy that I switched from force carbonation to priming my kegs. You might want to give it a try some time. I realize that this is off topic from your post but I get good results by priming a keg with 5/8 C. of LME boiled in a little water. When I originally started doing force carbonation I would put both the CO2 tank and the keg into the fridge and leave it one for a day or so. And my keg does have a carbonation stone as well which helps to break up the CO2 into tiny bubbles so you can carbonate the beer faster.
It’s very easy to have a slow leak you may not detect, and before you know it, all the CO2 is gone. As long as the CO2 in your tank is liquified, the needle on your main pressure gauge comes down very very slowly. When the majority of the CO2 has leaked out and all that remains has turned to a gas, the needle drops like a rock and your tank is on the big “E” for empty. I had two kegs hooked to the CO2 tank and the liquid out post on one of them had a very slow leak and only after the CO2 tank was empty did I realize that.
You’d have to have a pretty significant leak for it to drop like a rock though. Once the liquid has all evaporated, the tank is still 10% full and on a 5 lb tank that’s enough to carb/serve about 5-10 gal of beer depending on carb level and losses.
I think a lot of home brewers have CO2 leaks but don’t know/care since we go through relatively little.
Sean is so right. I have lost a tank or two from inattention to barrel swivel connections working loose from outlying kegs or just not checking them from keg to keg when disconnecting and reconnecting. I spray them down from time to time to check, but use a leak check product when doing any major overhaul of a line or component. Or just a dip in a bucket of water, if circumstances allow. I had a valve go bad on a manifold that I replaced and it was leaking (I had the tank valve shut off after putting pressure on the lines and the regulator slowly went to zero). It turned out that the line to the manifold had loosened. It wasn’t replaced, but merely loosened up enough to leak. I discovered it when I put the manifold into a bucket of water - never even considering that it would leak at that spot.