Kegging with a Syphon
How do we reduce oxygen contact?
We spend a lot of time selecting or developing a recipe, brewing, fermenting and conditioning. The final stage is bottling or legging. We want to reduce the contact between our beer because oxygen causes oxidisation, and in beer that comes across as wet dog.
In this case we’re looking at kegging and ways of reducing oxygen contact when you have to syphon.
“Anybody who doesn’t know what soap tastes like never washed a dog.”
The equipment need to syphon to a keg is pretty simple - a syphon and a keg.
The first step, as always, is to clean and sanitise everything. To sanitise the keg, I put about 2L of water in it with Stellarsan, seal it up and shake it. Let it sit on top and bottom, roll it around and repeat regularly over 10 minutes.
Connect a CO2 bottle and a party tap to remove the sanitising liquid - this can now be used to sanitise the syphon.
Purge any additional air out of the keg by slowly releasing it from the PRV valve.
Disconnect the CO2 bottle and release the remaining pressure from the keg.
Open the lid of the fermenter and the keg. You’ll notice a lot of foam in the keg - don’t worry about it, it is food safe and won’t affect the beer. in fact the foam will provide extra protection from oxygen by creating a layer above the beer.
Start your syphon and watch the condensation on the side of the keg to check how fast the siphon is going.
Follow the instructions to start your autosyphon and keep an eye on the bottom of the syphon to make sure it doesn’t come out of the beer - you don’t want to have to restart it.