mac.cartier
Member
Hey all, I am just getting into kegging and I’m brainstorming ways to perform a closed transfer from my plastic fermentation bucket to a keg. I don’t have a ton of space so using one of my kegs to ferment will limit my batch size and how many beers I can have on tap at a time.
I purchased some gamma seal lids which claim to be airtight so that I can watch the bubbler bubble. I am hoping to be able to use the airlock fitting/hole to apply a few PSI of CO2 and push the beer out another access port in the lid.
I think this is feasible, the beer would need to travel at most 15” up a tube/cane.
Using the hydrostatic pressure formula P = ρ*g*h, with ρ = 1050 kg*m^-3, g = 9.31 m*s^-2, and h = 0.381 m, we get a pressure of 3850 Pa or 0.56 psi. I’m reasonably confident that the lid will be able to hold 1 psi for a few minutes.
For fittings, I am thinking that the CO2 inlet could be a ball-lock post, a MFL connector, or just a hole with a grommet that will accommodate some tubing. The liquid outlet could be any of these three but there is the question of whether I want to use a fixed dip tube or if I want to stick a racking cane in there to accommodate different levels of trub. I’m an apartment brewer so I do relatively small batches (1 - 2.5 gal). Because of this I want to waste as little beer as possible when transferring. I thought about just adding a spout on the side of the bucket but that seems pretty inflexible in terms of trub level and I would really like the buckets to be stackable.
Any thoughts? Have any of you tried this?
I purchased some gamma seal lids which claim to be airtight so that I can watch the bubbler bubble. I am hoping to be able to use the airlock fitting/hole to apply a few PSI of CO2 and push the beer out another access port in the lid.
I think this is feasible, the beer would need to travel at most 15” up a tube/cane.
Using the hydrostatic pressure formula P = ρ*g*h, with ρ = 1050 kg*m^-3, g = 9.31 m*s^-2, and h = 0.381 m, we get a pressure of 3850 Pa or 0.56 psi. I’m reasonably confident that the lid will be able to hold 1 psi for a few minutes.
For fittings, I am thinking that the CO2 inlet could be a ball-lock post, a MFL connector, or just a hole with a grommet that will accommodate some tubing. The liquid outlet could be any of these three but there is the question of whether I want to use a fixed dip tube or if I want to stick a racking cane in there to accommodate different levels of trub. I’m an apartment brewer so I do relatively small batches (1 - 2.5 gal). Because of this I want to waste as little beer as possible when transferring. I thought about just adding a spout on the side of the bucket but that seems pretty inflexible in terms of trub level and I would really like the buckets to be stackable.
Any thoughts? Have any of you tried this?