Making the switch from bottles to kegs

[BierGut]

I'm building my first man cave and one of my first additions of course will be the bar. I'm done with bottling and want to make the switch to kegging my homebrew. I may still want to bottle a few though to give to friends so I was wondering how to handle carbonating the beer. Do you still add priming sugar when you keg or does the CO2 take care of all that? If CO2 is carbing my beer in the keg do I have to use sugar tablets or something to carb the bottles?

 

[Foosier]

Carb the beer in the keg, then bottle from the tap. See the "we don't need no stinking beer gun" thread for instructions.

 

[Foosier]

By "carb in the keg" I mean force carbonate using your CO2 tank. You do not use sugar to prime a keg under normal circumstances. (It can be done, but this is less common.)

 

[BierGut]

Thanks Foosier!

 

[cmoewes]

I frequently carb in my keg using priming sugar. I have enough kegs, 6 with only 3 taps on my keezer, that once I keg I still can/like to give the beer several weeks to age. Rather than force carb them I will add about 1/2 of the priming sugar I would if bottling, purge the headspace of oxygen, pressurize and let them carb naturally.

Bottling from the keg is super easy. Look for the article mentioned above but basically a party tap with a length of bottle wand.

 

[Zepth]

General consensus is to hook up the CO2 lines and leave it for long enough at serving pressure and it will force CO2 into the beer. I mostly stick with this method it's just so simple to do it and a little faster in the end. I ran the numbers and it is cheaper to prime like a bottle, but I was bored one day with nothing to do.

That said you can naturally carbonate if you'd like. I have done it before as have others. I don't have quite as large a keezer to fit my kegs into and also likely won't be chopping it up to make more fit inside any time soon. This means that I occasionally fill a keg that won't be tapped for a month or 4, either by lack of option or by intention to age. For the ones that will be aging I will usually naturally carbonate. Calculate priming sugar, add it to keg and rack on top. Very important to at least hook it up to the CO2 for a bit to make sure that the keg seals up properly. Nothing worse than finding out it had a bad seal, didn't carbonate, then got infected because of the bad seal.

 

[dnslater]

I bought a Perlick bottle filler for mine. Problem solved.