Filling bottles from a corny keg

When I first started brewing New England IPA (or for that matter any really hoppy pale ale), I never realised that it was difficult to bottle condition. The beer oxidises really easily and it is almost impossible to bottle condition it without it turning grey and tasteless. I know, I tried!

Even if you do successfully bottle it, it’s lifespan will be very limited.

The easiest solution to this problem is to put it in a keg. You can do the transfer from the fermenter to the keg under pressure and avoid any exposure to oxygen at all. And it is relatively easy to do as long as you have the kit. However, it does have the drawback that it is more difficult to share with your friends (particularly during Lockdown). So how do you get it into bottles?

Again, there are a number of solutions to this, but they all work roughly the same way. They are none as counter pressure bottle fillers (catchy eh?):

• Fill the bottle with CO2;
• Fill the bottle with beer from the bottom driving the CO2 out of top of the bottle;
• When the bottle is full, fill the top of the bottle with CO2 and cap.

The products to have a look at are the Blichmann Beergun, Boel iTap and the TapCooler. There are others. All of them are around the £100 mark, most of them are currently out of stock in the UK. I blame the pandemic. I did however manage to get a TapCooler and some accessories. And the good news is that it seems to work!

The TapCooler attaches to one of the taps on my kegerator. I needed to buy the extension tube as there wasn’t enough space between the tap and the bottle filler. No drama! These are readily available.

You also need to check that the taps on your kegerator are “forward sealing” – no idea what this means, but mine are! I checked on the Mangrove Jack’s website! Looks like Intertap and Ultrataps are all forward sealing.

After a bit of experimenting, it is actually quite quick to fill bottles from the keg. I could probably fill 2-3 a minute with a bit of pratice. Couple of learnings:

• You need to make sure the beer that you are putting in the bottles is properly carbonated. I found that I probably wasn’t carbonating the beer enough when serving it from the kegerator. I bottled some beer and found it to be a bit flat. I carbonated the beer a bit more and re-tried. Second set of bottles were much better carbonated;
• The standard TapCooler attaches to the gas line using a barb. There is a ball valve attachment able and this would make life a lot easier. There is also a over flow pipe attachment available and this will make life less messy.
• A second bottle of CO2 makes life a lot easier. One is attached to the kegerator to serve the beer. The second is attached to the TapCooler to fill the bottles with CO2.