To keg or not to keg, that is the question

Whether tis nobler in the mouth to gather one’s beer in a container of outrageous size, or to take small containers against a sea of ale, and by separating preserve them?
OK, enough Hamlet… I could go on and on. This is the crux of one issue confronting the homebrewer, however. How to store that precious liquid? The short answer is "it depends"; the two common forms of libation protection have different and specific uses. Let us take a brief look at each one in turn:

The keg:

Traditionally, the keg was a large wooden drum, assembled at the brewery, winery, or distillery by skilled craftsman (coopers). Kegs now generally refer to stainless steel drums, and wooden drums for the storage of beer and wine are called casks. Commercial beer kegs are actually half-kegs (15.5 US gallons - also known as a 1/2 barrel), while homebrew kegs are generally converted 5 gallon soda syrup containers referred to as cornelius kegs (Are you confused yet?).

Keg Advantages:

• easier to fill than bottles

• great for dispensing a lot of beer quickly (parties)

• easier to clean

• allows for force (mechanical) carbonation

Keg Disadvantages:

• not very portable (heavy, requires a carbon dioxide tank and regulator)

• proper carbonation can be tricky to balance

• even trace contamination will ruin the whole batch

• to send beer to competitions, it must be bottled using a counterpressure filler

Bottles:

People have been brewing beer (or at least a fermented beverage derived from grains) for thousands of years. Since the advent of glassblowing, they’ve probably been filling bottles with it. The modern concept is pretty much the same as it has always been, with the exception of the cap. The cap is a piece of molded round metal with a plastic fitting that is crimped tightly onto the top of a full bottle of beer with a tool specifically designed for the task. Both caps and cappers are widely available, and any non-screwtop beer bottle can be recycled into the service of the homebrewer.

Bottle Advantages:

• portable

• cheap/disposable

• facilitate long term aging/storage of big beers

• yeast-driven carbonation and the resulting bottle sediment contribute (some would say are essential) to the flavor and stability of the beer. Only naturally carbonated ale is considered “Real Ale”.

Bottle Disadvantages:

• A pain to clean

• A pain to fill

Hopefully this list of pros and cons will help you decide which choice is right for you. If you host a lot of parties and your beer never seems to last very long, I would recommend kegs. If (like me) beer tends to persist longer in your fridge, you would like to store part of a batch for aging, and/or you enter a lot of competitions, bottles are probably the way to go. The annoyance of cleaning and filling bottles is offset for me by the sight of bottles from 20 different batches of homebrew sitting in my fridge at the same time!

Kegging Tips:

I don’t keg my beer, so I’ll have to refer you to outside sources on this one. Check the index of any of the many homebrew reference books available (Brew Ware, for example, has a whole chapter on kegging), or visit here, here, or here.

One note: ‘Corny’ kegs come in two types, ball lock and pin lock. The fittings from one do not work on the other, so when procuring keg equipment, make sure to adhere to a single standard!

Bottling Tips:

#1 – Use a bottle filler which the shutoff valve at the top, not the bottom. That way, the level of the beer when you stop filling is the level that you get when you pull the filler out (disregarding the space taken up by the filler tube itself, which isn’t much).

#2 – Put the bottling bucket up high (I set mine on the washing machine) and put the bottles on a stand about chair-height to fill them (I use a plastic roughneck tote – also useful as a tub to clean and store the bottles). This way, you can comfortably sit in a chair while filling. It beats the heck out of kneeling on the floor!

#3 – Use Iodophor, not boiling, to sanitize the caps. I know iodophor is mildly corrosive to metals, but I rinse the caps in hot water after a few minutes and they never seem to suffer any ill effects. Boiling, on the other hand, can damage the plastic seals, particularly the oxygen-absorbing ones.

#4 – Clean the bottles, especially “recycled” ones, very thoroughly. If the labels are still on, a soak in hot water will loosen them. Experience will teach you which breweries have labels that come off easily. After label removal or in between batches. my cleaning method is to rinse them well with a jetwasher, soak them in dilute bleach overnight and rinse them again. On bottling day I fill them with diluted Iodophor solution for a few minutes to sterilize them. Investing in a bottle tree is helpful here. It holds the bottles inverted so the residual iodophor drips out as they dry. Iodophor is "rinse free", so the bottles are ready to use as soon as they stop dripping.

#5 – Add the priming sugar to the bottling bucket first, then rack the beer onto it. I also use the cane end of the rack to (gently!) stir the green beer with the priming sugar. This ensures even and consistent priming.

#6 – Use bottles of varying sizes in each batch. Big bottles save time on bottling day and are great for parties, but sometimes 12 oz is all you want.

#7 – Store your beer in a cool, dark place. No matter how clean the fill is, heat and light are still the bane of beer. I carbonate my ales at 67°F for 2-4 weeks (big beers - over 1.070 OG - I let go longer), then store them in the fridge.

A final thought:

Some commercial microbreweries (and some homebrewers) are closing the circle and returning to beer packaged in wooden vessels - casks. Cask-conditioned ale is generally served at room temperature, with lower levels of carbonation. This is traditionally natural carbonation, with live yeast still in the cask. The beer is drawn off through a hand pump referred to as a beer engine (what a great term) and replaced by room air, not carbon dioxide. These differences, combined with the aging effects of the wood, lend cask-conditioned ale qualities that are often described as soft, smooth, mellow, or complex. To be fair, some less charitable descriptions (bland, watery, horsey, musty) might also apply, depending on what microbes sneak into the vessel along with the air and what draft style the drinker is used to. People seem to either love or hate cask-drawn beer. Casks are available online and at some homebrew stores for home use, however they are by no means cheap.