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Questions before I bottle my first batch.
Hello everybody,
I'm in the process of brewing my first batch and I really am having a great time so i'm hoping people can help me by guiding me to the perfect first batch. I'm already planning to do things differently the second time but for the first attempt I pitched the wort into my 5 gallon carboy and ran a hose into a bottle for the initial fermantation overflow. After a week I switched to an airlock and now I figure i'm about a week from racking it into a corneilius keg I bought on craigs list. Ok so here are some questions for the board. If i'm racking it into the bottling bucket do where and when do i add what amount of suger.
Also has anybody ever filled like 3/4 of a 5 gallon keg and bottled a few beers to show off. My last point is on a slightly different topic. I was trying to find some good bottles to use for the second batch and I found that in Nevada with no recycling refund, everybody just throws away growlers and all the good glass that would have been easy to find in Boston.
So i guess i'm going to need to buy bottles. I went to a gas station and saw that Tecate beer sells a 32 oz glass bottle with a pressed cap on it (by pressed I mean it requires a bottle opener, its not twist or plastic) Does anybody know of a reason why I shouldn't use these bottles. They seem of normal thickness for beer bottles.
For 5 gallons, 3/4 of a cup of corn sugar or plain white table sugar is a good start. Dissolve it first in a pint of boiling water. Pour that sugar solution into your bottling bucket. then rack the beer from the fermentor on top of that. It should mix just fine on its own (although I am sure you are going to hear differently from others on this site).
Bottles:
I don't know anything about the bottles you are refering too, but they should be fine. I would suggest though that you use brown bottles only. Aren't you drinking any commercial beer that you could have saved the bottles from???
Keg:
If you plan to partially fill a keg, and hope that it primes with the sugar, I would be a bit skeptical, proper carbonation requires proper headspace (the void volume above the beer in the bottle or keg). In this case that huge headspace would take alot of sugar to properly pressurize.
I only say that because it doesn't sound like you have a complete tap system. You still need a tank of pressurize CO2 to push the beer out. Furthermore, you could fill that headspace from that tank if you really wanted a partilly filled keg.
If you are committed to kegging, I would just recommend putting all the beer in the keg without sugar, chill it down, then force carbonate it by putting it at 12 PSI for a week or so.
You can always fill a few bottles off the keg for trasport later... but that's a different thread.
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