The Mad Quest for Bottling

Since switching over to kegging most of my homebrew, I have not had the same opportunity to bottle beer.  This is not a particularly missed endeavor.  Bottling homebrew is messy, time consuming, and ultimately anti-climatic because the beer has to be conditioned in the bottles for about 10 days before its ready to drink.  I found it important to have homebrew already bottled, in order to have some to drink while bottling.  When I started kegging I set aside the bottling stuff without hesitation.

But now that I've been kegging for a while, I've run into an unexpected challenge.  When I want to share my homebrew, I have to clean the house first.  Why?  Because I can't take it with me, which means cleaning the house for company.


I dislike cleaning house (which is one of the very reasons that I got into kegging in the first place!), so this means that I've been thrust back into bottling again.  And therein lies the challenge:  How do you bottle beer that has been kegged without buying the $70 beer gun that (supposedly) makes it easy?

I started by asking my local homebrew shop.  They gave me the rundown of how it can be done, so my buddy Pete and I tried it.  It was a miserable failure.  The beer was flat, flat, flat.

So, more research, this time via the intertubes...

This video explained basically the same process my homebrew shop had recommended. After watching this, we tried again with moderate success, but still not quite what I was hoping for - still a bit too much on the flat side.  So, we improvised.  We boiled up some priming sugar and combined the (already CO2 carbonated) beer and sugar and bottle as normally.  This worked like a trick, but its just as labor intensive and messy as bottling from the start (plus trying to guestimate the amount of priming sugar to bottle only a 12 pack of beer gave me a math headache).

Photo Courtesy: highgravitybrew.com

Back to the homebrew store for more advice.  They tell me that this isn't a foolproof way to get good carbonated beer in bottles from a keg, but recommended trying a different bottle filler than what I was using.  The cheap bottle fillers have a little cap at the end of a plastic tube with a little plastic plunger.  You press down on the plunger and the beer begins to flow.  The one I have is spring loaded, and the homebrew shop recommended going with one that is gravity fed.  Basically, instead of a spring pushing it closed, the weight of the beer pushes it closed.

To be honest, I'm not convinced this is going to make much difference at all, but hey, I'm game to try it (and the new beer filler was less than $3).  Tonight I'll post up the results.