Bottling or Kegging Your Homebrew

Bottling or Kegging your Homebrew

We have discussed getting started as a homebrewer and the differences between Extract kits and All Grain Brewing in our earlier articles.  Now, you had a successful brew day. Fermentation went off without any hiccups. And now you’re ready to drink and enjoy your delicious brew, but will you bottle it or keg it?

There are pros and cons for both. The two main methods for home brewers to package their beverages is either to bottle or keg. And when we talk about these two methods, we often distinguish them, by the way, we carbonate our brew.

With bottling we use a technique called bottle conditioning, which is where we use additional sugars to feed the remaining yeast and in return create more CO2 so that the sealed bottle that will build pressure, creating carbonation

 For kegging, we use force carbonation, which is where we use a tank of CO2 to force inject gas into the beverage to make it fizzy. For most beginner brewers, the cheapest option is to start with bottling.

 The biggest pro to bottling is that it’s cheap. By saving old beer bottles or collecting some from your friends, you can package your beer for cents. You just need to make sure you clean those bottles thoroughly.  You will want to dissolve a pre-determined amount of priming sugar (extra sugar to get the reenergize the remaining yeast) into a pan or pot.  Then stir in the priming sugar mixture to your fermented brew. Priming is the process of adding sugar to the fermented beer. This is a crucial step because if you miss calculate, how much sugar you add, you can either have an under carbonated beer or worse and over carbonated beer, that can be a potential risk for an exploding bottle.  There are also carbonating tablets available that make the priming a little easier and less room for error.

 And then you just rack into the bottles. This is usually done with an auto siphon and tubing. You submerge the siphon into the beer and then lift up the inner part and swiftly pushed down into the liquid begins, moving through. It might take a few pumps to get going.

A bottling filler helps you move from bottle to bottle with minimal mess. Otherwise, the liquid will keep coming out until it’s all gone. The bottling wand has a spring and valve that when pressed down and less severe flow and when released it stops.  Then you just need to seal the bottle with a cap. Caps are very cheap and you can buy them in bulk. A hand capper is a cheap option and a one-time purchase that should last you forever. They’re also floor cappers that are even easier to use, but cost a little bit more. Lastly, just set those bottles somewhere dark and cool for two weeks.

 Kegging on the other hand can be simpler and faster. Kegs come in all shapes and sizes, but for the most part, they don’t come cheap. The typical home brewing keg is known as a Cornelius keg or “corny keg” and they can hold five gallons of liquid. 

On top of the keg, there is a main opening for putting beer in and to easily clean. There are also two posts on top one for the gas to go in and another for the beverage to come out.

For kegging you will also need a Co2 tank and regulator, along with gas and beer line tubing, a tap or faucet and quick disconnects that connect the tubing to the keg. 

I typically set my regulator to about 10 PSI and then I just let it sit for about a week.  While it’s faster than bottling, if that’s not fast enough, you can do some other tricks to make it faster by raising the pressure to higher amounts for shorter amounts of time.

To serve in the keg, you need to attach your liquid tubing to a liquid connect and then have some sort of tap. Picnic taps at the cheapest option. But kegerators or Keezers with dedicated taps, make pouring much more enjoyable. Plus, CO2 dissolves into liquid better at cold temperatures. 

So, while kegging in general, is a simpler and quicker method of packaging. It has a much more expensive price tag to start, but after you’ve bottled for a while, you’ll begin to learn how much convenience and time can cost you.

If you find home brewing to be a hobby for you, I can’t recommend enough getting into kegging, but that doesn’t mean I don’t bottle anymore. I still will do it on smaller batches or if my kegs are filled up.  Our store, Learn to Brew, has all the bottling and kegging supplies available and we are here to help answer your questions so you can make and enjoy great brews.   Cheers!