bottle filling from force carbonated keg

[vendejp]

an article on st. pats that discusses kegging says you can just bottle force carbonated beer from your keg. It says the beer should be cold and you should cap it immediately after.

So, you fill your keg, force carbonate, then just pour the beer into a sanitized bottle and seal it up. It suggests attaching a 3/8 inch ID tube to your tap and turning the CO pressure down very low so it pours slowly and without aeration.

has anyone done this before? It would be nice to be able preserve a bottle or two of a really good batch or if you want to save it for someone or something.

Thanks

heres the link. its a pdf (http://www.stpats.com/Kegging.pdf)

[S.F.B.]

I have done this on a few occasions. Not only should the beer be cold but the bottle also. I fill each bottle I am doing with no rinse sanitizer to the brim and put in the fridge for a nice cold rest. About an hour to get it down to an equal temp with the beer. Take out of the fridge pour out sanitizer and fill with beer cap and you're done. I haven't had any complaints thus far.

Hope this helps.

[brewmonkey]

We hand bottle all the beer we put out in bottles. We do it straight from the bright tanks with a filler I designed. You should leave some headspace, but try to "Cap on foam". By having the foam in there you will drive out some of the remaining oxygen.

Big thing with this is prior to filling you need to evacuate the bottles with some CO2. For mine I made an evacuater out of some vinyl tubing and hook that to a picnic tap. Take a clear racking cane and cut it down to about 12" and that will fit into the out spout of the tapper. You can use this to evacuate the bottle, a good 3-4 second burst of CO2 (set on a low pressure) should do the trick.

You can also use this setup and add a rubber stopper drilled to fit around the racking cane to fill with. Sticking the cane into the bottle, set the stopper to fit just snuggly into the neck but leaving some space for gas to escape. Using a low pressure you can fill the bottles fairly easy.

Now this is a 2 man operation this way, but it has worked well for us.

If you are going to bottle condition you can skip the evacuation and mix your priming sugar in with the beer (in a corny) and fill the bottles like that.

[vendejp]

thanks for the responses...

just one last question... do you notice that the beer tastes different than if it is bottled with priming sugar? does it last as long in the bottles?

thanks again.

[YamahaXS]

click HERE (http://hbd.org/mtippin/cpfiller.html) for a description of a counter-pressure bottle filler.