Pressure transfer to Cornelius Keg
The Fermzilla version of this one’s been cold-crashing for 3 days now, time to get it into a Corny keg. Standard setup this afternoon; brought the ready purged keg up to 9 PSI matching the Fermzilla, connected the Bouncer filter between the liquid out posts, popped the PRV on the keg to get things going before connecting the gas posts with a straight line. I left the Fermzilla in the fridge the whole time, and there was enough height difference to the keg for gravity to do it’s thing, filling it in around 20 minutes.
I’m not 100% convinced I need the Bouncer filter when doing a pressure transfer via the floating dip tube as that doesn’t really pick anything up, especially on a cold-crashed beer where everything’s well and truly dropped out. If anything, the Bouncer is a bit of a pain as it doesn’t handle pressure too well and is just one more thing to clean at the end of the day.
15 Lager Bottles
The 5 litres or so that I moved to the SS Brewtech Mini Bucket ahead of applying pressure to the Fermzilla has been bubbling very, very slowly while it’s sister vessel was cold-crashing, so I’m going to call time on this one and also put it away. This time I used Bag-Thing on top (but forgot to refill it) and added 1.5g of Dextrose to each of the 15 clear lager-style 330 ml bottles before filling those via the bottling wand and tube attached to the bucket’s lower spigot. I started out by also priming the first bottles with CO2 from the cylinder, but noted that on drawing out the wand I will have sucked air back in as the level went down, so I gave up on the CO2 figuring that there’s no finishing hops to be oxidised anyway, and that the reaction of beer on dextrose did produce some gas which had the caps lifting a little while they were waiting to be fixed.
Some Gravity
Even though I kegged the Fermzilla first I set it aside before measuring OG, and instead bottled the SS bucket then measured OG there from the inch or so that was below the dip tube. The brew bucket came in at about 1.017 and when I got around to grabbing a sample from the Fermzilla’s collection jar I thought there was a discrepancy, because that weighed in at 1.019 to 1.020 – difficult to say due to carbonation. It soon dawned on me that I was seeing a difference because the Fermzilla was still at chiller temperature, so anywhere between 4 and 6℃. Plugging those values into Brewfather’s hydrometer temperature correction tool soon had my numbers lining up.
