Friends… need some advice please. For the first time I tried using a keg for secondary and dry hopping. I transferred to another keg for serving but unfortunately, transferred in quite a bit of hop sediment. After carbonating for a few days at 30 psi, I turned down to serving pressure to check my level of carbonation and ended up with clogging. I depressurized, removed the out post, cleared the dip tube and post and reassembled. I went through this a number of times, probably eight or more, and still had clogging. At this point I put the keg back into the fridge to drop the sediment, but I am unsure if I should just transfer to another keg or try again. I am worried about infection at this point.
Any and all advice on how to proceed is greatly appreciated!
You could try and put a filter on the inlet of the dip tube if you have loose hop matter in your keg and just serve directly from there. I’m not affiliated with these vendors (disclaimer) but other brewers seem to have had good luck using these products. The second one has huge surface area which should stand up many ounces of loose hops. I think if you sanitize carefully, it should be fine. Keep the headspace purged with CO2 while you change out the dip tube / add the filter to avoid oxygen exposure.
These do work very well, but ideally they’re attached before kegging and carbonating the beer. Using them in this instance would require reaching a hand (gloved and sani’d of course) into the beer inside the keg to slip it on.
A shorter diptube (bent or cut) would be less damaging–again, in this particular situation–from an oxidation standpoint. All the crap you’re trying to avoid picking up is on the bottom of the keg. Just need to get the diptube slightly away the bottom.