Anybody have extra special tips on cleaning/sanitizing before I transfer my beer over? I'm looking for stuff that's not obvious and is easy to overlook.

Also, can I just bulk prime, or do I need to pre-pressurize with CO2? Cuz I don't have a CO2 tank yet.

the first time i get intimate with a keg, i pump her full of a few gallons hot water and roll, rock, shake the crap out of her. empty. clean the dip tubes out, replace poppets, and o-rings. reassemble WITH lube. (not KY!). then i shake a gallon of starsan and rock. roll. dispense through the out tube to also clean a line while i'm at it. that leaves starsan foam and co2 in her until i'm ready to fill. to fill, i simply pop her top off, siphon into the bottom. then purge with 30psi a few times to set the lid. i've heard if priming sugar is to be used, you use like half the amount or so, but i'm not 10000% on that.

For cleaning nothing beats the old standby: hot caustic (1 lb lye in 5 gal hot water). But this is pretty nasty stuff so I don't recommend you use it unless you are aware of the dangers, have the proper safety gear (face shield and gloves) and have a safe way to dispose of it. The keg(s) should be disassembled and the parts soaked in hot caustic too. Any questionable bits (poppets etc.) should be replaced. Obviously, kegs treated with caustic should be rinsed very thoroughly.

When it comes to filling 2 things are importat: sanitation and the exclusion of air. There are dozzens of sanitizers out there but clearly a no-rinse one is best as to rinse a sanitizer out you would have to use boiled (and cooled) water. The key here is to fill the keg absolutely full with the sanitizer (or rinse) i.e. not one cc of air should be in there. Probably the best way to insure this is fill through the liquid port, open the gas poppet when the tank is full so that any air in the gas tube is expelled, and then open the relief valve while continuing to fill until liquid comes out the relief valve. The next step is to push the sanitizer (or rinse) out of the keg with CO2 and leave on residual pressure sufficient to maintain the seal and a bit above the pressure in the vessel you are going to fill from. You now have a sanitized keg with no air in it and that's the goal for a keg which is to be filled with beer. When filling, bleed the CO2 at the same rate you admit beer. The best way to do this is put together a tee with a pressure gauge on one leg, a needle valve on another and a host to a gas connector on the other. Put the gas connector on the gas port, read the pressure, open the needle valve to let CO2 escape until the keg pressure is a bit below the fermenter pressure, then attach the liquid connection so beer can flow. Adjust the needle valve to keep the pressure a psi or 2 below the fermenter pressure.

In this way to transfer the beer without air pickup and without loss of its carbonation.

Not sure why you would find it necessary to fill the keg 100% full of sanitizer. I'm sure it works, I just wanted to relate a different approach.

For sanitizing, I just make up a half gallon of StarSan solution, take the keg apart and dunk the parts in StarSan, put it back together, dump in the StarSan, close it up and shake, then dump the StarSan back out. Has worked 100% of the time for me.

As for filling the keg with beer, filling the empty, sanitized keg with CO2 and then opening the relief valve three times or so will purge it of air. Then you can siphon the beer into the keg with no worries--even with the lid open, the CO2 will stay in the keg since it's heavier than air. Then close it up and purge the headspace with CO2 a couple times and bring up to pressure.

There are other ways to do it, but this seems easiest to me, and works.

It's the only practical way to get all the air out. The other method (what I actually use) is to run steam through for about 15 minutes. This displaces all the air and sanitizes at the same time.



Not much to the sanitizing part. As long as you get everything wet with an effective sanitizeer you are there. Getting air out is the tricky part.

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Think about this for a minute. You have a keg at 14.7 psia (1 atmosphere) air. You pressurize to 30 psig. That's 45 psia (lets call an atmosphere 15 psia to make the math a little easier. Total pressure 45 pisa, air 15 psia for 1/3 air. Bleed that back to 15 psia. Now you have a partial pressure of air of 5 psia in there. Repressurize to 30 psig i.e. 45 psia. You now have 40 psia partial pressure of CO2 and 5 psia air i.e. 1/9. Bleed back and repeat. You now have 1/27 atmosphere air for, bled back to 0 psig (15 psia) that's 0.2 psia air or 0.04 psia partial pressure of oxygen - a lot more than you want. Looked at another way you have 19000 mL gas in the keg after three repeats. 19000/27 = 703 mL air and of that 1/5th or 140 mL is oxygen.

You can, of course, "solve" this problem by purging more times or using a higher pressure of CO2 each time or both. But you are wasting a lot of CO2 in so doing. Much easier, IMO, to displace the air with something that really displaces it.



I suppose this would work (including the poor purging) for beer that isn't to be kept very long and for beer where diacetyl isn't a concern. But oxygen is a bad boy - responsible for staling and diacetyl and you really want to do everything you can to combat it. Displacement of all air with water or sanitizer is a pretty easy way to be sure you have it all out. The advantages of counter pressure filling are well worth the trouble.

Using these methods I've had kegged beers stay good for over 2 years.

Toatally agree. I have tasted the diffrence since I started using a 10 gallon keg as fermenter and pressure transfer to a purged keg. I find that the beer that never has a chance to come in contact with oxygen after fermentation has started tastes better long term than those I did before when I just open transfered to the purged open top keg. The other advantage is I can spund the fermenter and cold crash and transfer mostly carbonated beer to the keg.

So I just had a thought. To combine these two methods, could I put a couple gallons of star san water in the keg, then blow CO2 in the liquid side to create CO2 filled bubbles, which will fill up the space and push air out the gas side?

What you can do is fill the keg nearly full. If you fill it to the point where there is a 1 L headpace and then do the purge on the headspace as described for an empty keg in an earlier post you will, after three atmospheric, 30 psig, atmospheric cycles have purged the 1 liter to 1/27th of its air. If you then push the liquid out with CO2 you will have 1000/27 mL of air left which is better than 19000/27 mL.