No PFFFT when bottling from a keg

General Homebrew Discussion
21

I tried several experiments

  • Bottling carbonated beer with just a bit of sugar in a syrup. This actually worked well as far as carbonation, and I didn’t notice any off flavors from tired yeast
  • Bottling carbonated beer with a syrup of sugar and cask conditioning yeast. This also worked well but was a little inconsistent, perhaps due to my not measuring the syrup as accurately as I should.
  • Bottling a few bottles with priming sugar syrup before transferring the rest of the beer to a keg. This was standard bottle conditioning and worked well, but the switchover from bottling to kegging was messier than I anticipated. It required all the preparation for bottling and all the preparation for kegging on the same day.
  • Bottling from a keg with a counter pressure filler. The first attempt was a complete failure because the filler had 2 gas leaks and wouldn’t hold pressure. After fixing the leaks and practicing a bit I was able to reliably cap on foam and end up with the right amount of head space. This now works well enough that I am not going to mess around with the yeast any longer unless there is an exceptional situation that requires it.
1 Like
22

Since I just bottled from the keg recently with good results, I thought I’d reply.

I left my CO2 at the same pressure, but dropped the temperature by 10°. (I keep it at 46° normally, so this might not with for everyone.)

I mixed a bucket of StarSan with ice and dropped bottles in there, so that they’d be sanitized, icy cold, and wet. This prevented foaming when filling the bottles with a NB “last straw.”

For the bottles that didn’t foam enough when filling, I rapped them with a wrench so that there would be enough foam that I could cap on foam.

My wife filled while I capped.

These bottles sounded like they were bottle conditioned when opened, and they generated a nice head of foam when poured.

1 Like
23

Whenever I have used the beer gun, I end up with a bit of foam on the top of the beer and an inch of air on top of that.

How do you get foam to fill the whole volume above the beer?

24

When I used a beer gun I would start to slowly withdraw the barrel when the liquid got up into the neck of the bottle. I continued to add liquid and when the tip of the barrel was out of the liquid it caused a lot of foam. With practice and good timing I could get just enough foam to come out the top of the bottle while leaving the proper head space after the foam subsided.

1 Like
25

I do exactly the same thing. This allows me to cap on foam and works well for me.

2 Likes