So I might want to bring the brew and machine to a happening, and I bought another keg for this.
Can anyone tell me best way to transfer from one keg to another?
Close the pinch valve, remove the dispensing tube from the tap, put the loose tube in empty keg and open the pinch valve? Then transport to new location, put the keg in machine, hook up co2 and let it repressurise?
I'm hoping to do similar myself. Tapping a finished brew off into a fresh clean keg, leaving the sediment behind in the brew keg should also allow it to travel better and not shake the sediment back into the beer.
My thoughts are:
Close the pinch valve, remove the dispensing tube from the tap, put the black connector off the spare dispensing tube onto the open end of the tube and connect that to the dispensing outlet of the spare keg. This may need a new longer tube - maybe not. Not sure yet.
Open the pinch valve slowly and let the beer flow to the new keg under its own pressure, then use the CO2 pump to push the rest of the beer through, carefully leaving the sediment in the bottom. This should disperse all the air in the new keg and leave only beer and CO2 so no oxygen is in there to start affecting the beer.
Close the pinch valve, remove the dispensing tube from the original brew keg and remove the black connector, fitting this back on the spare dispensing tube ready to use on your next brew once you've cleaned the original brew keg. You then attach the CO2 line and pressurise the beer a little in the new keg to keep it fresh.
You could then leave the freshly kegged beer in the fridge while you brew another batch in your spare keg, continuing with the above procedure to fill as many spare kegs as you've purchased.
Once you've transported all your kegs of glorious beer to your new drinking locaiton, put a keg in machine, hook up CO2 and let it repressurise.
Once the equal pressure transfer kit and spare bottles are available from iGulu, it should be much easier to transfer beers to take away and sample with your friends but that's never going to be as spectacular as showing up with the F1 machine and pouring everyone one of your famous brews straight from the tap.
This is still all theory as I've not recieved any brew kits or spare kegs yet. I just have a black F1 sat there waiting to be used. I do have a UPS tracking number now and have kits and kegs in transit, heopfully arriving on Monday
@MafD @Nova You should definitely check out their youtube channel. They have put up a fairly decent number of video guides on how to do things like this, that they have not mentioned anywhere else.
They have an entire video showing the process called "Keg Transfer & Flavor Infusion" showing how to transfer beer from one keg to another. It is essentially how you guessed it works MafD. Connect the two kegs together with the hose clamp in the middle, leave one keg in the iGulu with Co2 connected and in chill mode, and transfer over. Stop chill mode once all the beer is moved. You could also do a Oxygen expel step as well on the empty keg most likely by making use of adding Co2, and releasing air with the pressure release valve, before you transfer the beer to limit the amount of oxygen it comes into contact with. Just have to make sure that the pressure is not higher in the empty keg than the one with beer, or the liquid wont transfer over. Essentially follow the Deoxygenation step from their Equal Pressure Filling kit video, but with the full size kegs:
During their bottling process with the equal pressure kit, the last step is removing the presure, then the filling cap, and screwing on the lid, which introduces oxygen. But when trasfering from keg to keg, you never have to remove the lid and allow oxygen in, so it should maintain longer in the keg if you deoxygenated it.
Once your keg is pressurized as well I recommend pouring water onto the top of it to check for bubbles/Co2 leaks and make sure it is properly maintaining pressure. One of my four kegs, the area you plug the dispensing tube into, was leaking Co2 badly, to the point that I went through a 5lb tank in less than a week.
@Nova @MafD
I went ahead and recorded the entire process myself as well to show how to do this, including the oxygen purge. Not as professional as their videos are, but a more realistic idea of what it will look like if you do it.
In my case I am moving a peach cinnamon Kombucha from the keg filled with fruit and recently formed pellicle into a clean keg.
You can see in the video as well, that even with their most recent builds, their pressure readings when injecting pressure are still completley wonky. It always reads bad values until you inject pressure, then it will show the correct value for around half a second, then it will show bad values again.
Thank you, very helpfull.
I can see that the process has room for improvement from the igulu side.
After puring oxygen from new keg, why don't keep the full keg in the machine on cooling/co2 mode? Then it will automatic add pressure while transfering? Maybe to much and waste co2?
@Nova The opposite actually. It does not add enough Co2 for me in Cooling mode. If Cooling mode let me set the exact pressure level I want to run the unit at, that would work, but since it is all automated and it stops sometimes below even 12 PSI, I found it easier to actually use the mode where I have full pressure control, so I could set the pressure higher than cooling mode does, thus move the liquid quicker. In their official guide they did what you are mentioning.
Getting a huge foam transfer doing this with the Bavarian Wheat pack. I've let the keg warm a little but am going. Through huge amounts of CO2.
Anyone found a way to reduce foam during a keg transfer?
@Russell
Did you just go right into the empty keg, or did you do some oxygen purge first and raise the Co2 level in the keg you are moving it into by chance?
If you pick up a longer tube it should help with this, as it helps when dispensing, it would expect it to also help during transfer. Does having all of the foam actually hamper the process at all? Won't the liquid still fill up with no issue, just moving the foam up to the top till there is no more room for it. I would expect the beer to keep moving regardless of the foam situation until it is all over right? The only issue I might see you encounter is when purging the keg you are filling during the process some of the foam will spray out of the pressure purge so you would need to keep paper towels handy for that.
Also make sure to be releasing pressure from the keg you are moving the beer into to keep it below the one moving it from, and that should help keep the process moving quicker.
To give you an idea mine took around 8 minutes total time to transfer one keg to another, and the keg I was moving it into, I had the oxygen purge first and it started with a PSI of around 5.8. The Keg I was moving it from I started with a PSI of 22.6. By the time the pressure dropped to 17.04 it had moved around 40% full and slowed to an absolute crawl. At this point I released all of the built up pressure from the keg I was moving it into and I raised the pressure back up to 19.84 PSI for the full keg. The transfer then moved till it was around 85% full and the PSI was at 16.27. I purged the keg again and raised the PSI to 17.41.
This moved the rest of the liquid over with a final PSI of around 15 on the now empty keg.
So the entire process took around 10 PSI in the empty keg which I purged down to 5.8 PSI.
Then it took injecting around 12 PSI total of pressure into the full keg to move over into the empty keg. The full keg started at 17.6PSI and I bumped it to 22.6 PSI to start the process.
Making my total used Co2 as 22 PSI worth.
Not sure if that info will help you as PSI is not really an exact measurement of Co2 use, but that is how much pressure I injected during the process. If I had not purged the first keg at all then I would have used 12 PSI worth, but there would have been more oxidation.
