Special Issue: Guide to Kegging

The amount of carbonation lost during filling is heavily influenced by the carbonation level of the beer being filled. Highly carbonated beers lose more carbonation when bottled compared to beers with lower

This is the question that every brewer who bottles their beer wants answered, and the answer depends on your bottling techniques. When carbonated beer is bottled, the shelf-life clock starts ticking. With

If there are problems, what I would check first is the length of the fill tube. One of the most important rules of bottle filling is to gently fill the bottle. There

A counter-pressure bottle filler is designed to deliver a carbonated product into a bottle without excessive foaming. The basic idea behind these devices is to first pressurize the beer bottle to the

Bottle- and keg-conditioned ales must go through several key steps before they can be refrigerated and enjoyed. The first step is to estimate the volume of beer and to add an appropriate

I prefer to cold condition after carbonation, because you can remove yeast by racking the beer from keg to keg without worrying about having enough yeast in the beer at bottling time

The process of adding nitrogen to beer is referred to as nitrogenation. This is somewhat of a misnomer since nitrogenated beers also contain carbon dioxide and the gas blend used for the

I prefer to package beer in kegs for several reasons. Besides being convenient, perhaps the best thing about a keg is that it’s very easy to change the carbonation level in a

The “crank and shake” method to carbonate beer, which has a scrumptious name, is widely suggested and is probably the crudest method imaginable for carbonation. It is simply bad advice given by

The easiest and best way to properly carbonate your beer is to exercise a little patience and to equip yourself with the proper tools. In the case of carbonation, a gas table

In the United States, carbonation level is expressed in volumes of carbon dioxide. A volume of carbon dioxide is defined as the volume of gas that could be removed from a volume

Chemical off-flavors are frequently encountered in beer and can be caused by numerous factors. The most obvious cause comes from traces of cleaning or sanitizing chemicals left on equipment surfaces after use.

Ahhh, the old root-beer beer. This reminds me of a time when I screwed up a beer experiment with the remnants of a root beer experiment. We had three groups in our

So how do bottles differ from kegs? If bottled properly, they really should have similar storage properties. The big difference with bottling a five-gallon batch versus kegging a five-gallon batch is roughly

The answer to this question has plagued brewers since beer was first conceived or however it came into being. Many famous scientists studied the spoilage of beer and wine, and Louis Pasteur