Keg Beer at Home!

After all that I went through brewing BST Amber Ale, you think I would have made it easy on myself by remembering to get some Corn Sugar for the bottling/priming.  Not so.  My Wife suggested we go to Tallahassee, Florida and visit the Home Brew Den, a home brew store I've checked out online before, and is the closest home brew store to where we are now.  Of course its 2 hours away.  The morning of our trip, we were searching the site for items of interest and discovered we had the funds to get something I had been wanting for a while, a 5 gallon "Corny" keg with a 5 pound CO2 tank and all the regulators and tubes.

Now I learned the process of kegging my beer from a video on YouTube, I'm sure you could do the same.  As always the most important thing when brewing or bottling or kegging beer is cleaning and sanitizing your equipment.

I picked up some San Star from the brew store and added it to the keg to sanitize it.  It foamed up pretty good as you can see, and I made sure to dangle the cap in the sanitation as well.

The next step was to start to transfer the beer from my fermenter to my keg.

This time around I decided to utilize a secondary fermenter.  I've read and heard that a wort chiller and transferring your beer to a secondary fermenter will drastically improve beer clarity, and it does.

Once the beer is in your keg, you seal it up and prepare to carbonate it.  I decided to use the quick "force carbonation" method.  I apologize for not having more pictures of this part, I was too excited about doing it and forgot to take pictures.

First I set the regulator to 30 PSI and opened the valve to allow the CO2 to enter the tank.  For the next 4-5 minutes I vigorously rolled the keg on the floor back and forth ensuring to keep the gas hose and inlet closest to the floor.  After that some say to turn off the gas and remove the gas tube and age the beer for one day.  Others say you can blow off the excess pressure and pour a beer. I'm fairly impatient, so I released the excess gas and poured my first glass of BST Amber Ale.  I was not disappointed.

I leave you with a picture of my new keg system.......

Until next time.........