Bottling kegged beer

Question

My dilemma is this. I received a rare beer in a 1/2 barrel keg. I've been nursing on this beer from my kegerator now for 5 weeks (even had a party) and I've still got 5 gallons left. It sits at 9% so I can only have 2-3 pints a night before I'm kinda swasty faced. I would like to try to bottle it to see if it will age. That and I would like to get this 1/2 barrel out of my kegerator.

The set up I've thought would work is to hook a picnic hose up to my sanke tap, and then jam a bottling wand into the picnic tap.

My plan is to turn off my regulator then purge all the co2 out of my keg. Turn the regulator on to like 3-5 psi to get a nice flow(but avoid a large head). Keep the bottles in a Starsan cold solution then re-bottle the beer. Before I cap the bottle give it a blast of co2 from my handheld co2 bike pump.

Has anyone attempted this? I'm going to do a couple of test bottles this afternoon to see how the beer fairs after a week.

Answer 1

Man your question is the answer. You described it exactly how I would do it. I have done it this way in the past with homebrew beer and it works fine. I would suggest two mods to your process.

Don't bother with the bottling wand and its a source of turbulance that will help generate more foam. Just go with a straight shot of tubing from the tap to the bottom of your chilled bottles.

Second, I'd turn up the CO2 pressure on the keg for a couple days to get an extra 0.5 volume of CO2 into the beer. That will help ensure that the carbonation you lose doesn't result in too flat a beer in the bottle. You can always pour a slightly to "spritzy" beer a little hard to knock out an over carb situation, but you can't put more carb in a flat beer.