Oh No You Didn't!

Oh yes. Yes I did.

Keg on Wheels

Bottling is OK when we want to take a few beers somewhere, but we needed a more drastic solution for taking a lot of beer to a party. After poking around on the inter-toobes, we found this solution:

First we modified a 60 qt. cooler by removing the lid and making a new lid out of insulation board. The old lid popped right off and will go back on if we want to use cooler normally.

We bought a shorty party tap as the one I have is several feet long and would have ended up on the ground getting dirty or stepped on.

Finally we bought a portable keg charger. This is a small device that uses food-grade CO2 cartridges to push the beer out of the keg. This allows us to leave our big heavy CO2 tank at home.

The whole system worked great. The beer was cold all night and we only used up one CO2 cartridge serving an entire keg. The cooler and new lid worked better than expected maintaining temperature - we left the rig in the back of the truck overnight and there was only about a cup of melted ice this morning. Nice!

You Can't Take it With You... or Can You?

The only downside I have found so far of kegging is that you can't take your beer with you. Not without building something anyway, and that is far down on my list of projects. It IS on the list though...

However, I read of a method of bottling beer straight from the keg. This allows you to carbonate your beer with CO2 as usual in the keg and then fill up some bottles as well. The process involves putting together an improvised "beer gun" and filling bottles in a similar manner to the way breweries bottle.

The best part is that my dad gave me two cases of old-school returnables. I haven't seen these kinds of bottles or cases (the real thick cardboard ones) in years. I'm not even sure if they are still made... (UPDATE: All the major breweries have stopped distributing beer in returnable bottles. AB stopped about 2 years ago with the rest following shortly after. This may only apply here in MD, but I doubt it.)

Today I pulled a baker's dozen of them to try to soak the labels off with warm water & one step. I have heard this works really well, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

I'm hoping to bottle a 12 pack tomorrow to take to the beach next week. If it works, I'll detail the method here in the future. Otherwise I'll have 12 really flat beers to drink...

Batch #2 Kegged and a Yeast Wash

We kegged batch #2 Thursday night, a couple of days early but this time we know not to touch it for a while. We had a sample on its way into the keg - tasted good!

We also did our first yeast wash. I used a good yeast strain in this batch (Wyeast American Ale - 1056) so we recovered enough for 4 more batches. It is still mixed up with water in the picture, but the yeast should settle to the bottom.

I'm going to use one of them on the next batch this weekend, but I will definately use a starter - perhaps Tyler's OJ starter - to make sure I didn't screw anything up washing or storing the yeast. If the starter does fail, I can pitch the dry packet that came with the kit.

You can see the keg force-carbing in the picture as well - yum!