The reasons to take up kegging are many:
- You need to sanitize and fill only one vessel.
- You can precisely dial in your desired carbonation level.
- You suddenly acquire scores of new “friends.”
One of the most attractive aspects to kegging, however, is the convenience of having beer ready to drink on your terms. Bottle conditioning is subject to the whims and proclivities of yeast cells, but kegging lets one reliably introduce carbon dioxide according to a predictable schedule.
Every brewer develops his or her own process for getting CO2 into the keg, but most of us fall into one of four basic camps.
The Frugal
This method reserves carbon dioxide exclusively for dispensing and relies on cheap sugar to get the fizz: Just think of your keg as one big bottle. When you rack finished beer into the keg, add a measured amount of corn sugar or table sugar, seal the lid, and wait a couple of weeks for the yeast to do its thing. Doing it this way negates the aforementioned schedule advantage, but in return, you won’t have to buy CO2 as often.
Because the amount of headspace in the keg is smaller, relative to the total volume, than the sum total of the headspaces of fifty or more bottles, less sugar is needed to achieve the same level of fizz: Count on using about a third as much sugar as you normally would for bottles.
The downside? You have to wait as long to drink sugar-primed kegged beer as you do sugar-primed bottled beer. And you still need to hit the freshly primed keg with a shot of gas to seat the lid.
The Lazy
This is the easiest method for those who desire set-it-and-forget-it simplicity. Just hook up the gas at serving temperature and walk away for a week or two. Over that period of time, carbon dioxide will gradually dissolve into the beer with zero effort on your part. It will take at least a week to achieve an acceptable level of carbonation, closer to two for the carbonation to reach its final value. This method is especially helpful if you’re going out of town on vacation: Fresh beer on tap when you get home!
The Impatient
Here’s a method for the impatient among us. If you just can’t wait to try your newest creation, then you can overshoot the pressure initially to jumpstart the solution of CO2 into the beer. Let’s say your desired serving pressure is 12 pounds per square inch (psi). For the first day or two of carbonation, apply 30 psi or so to the keg. You might even give the keg a good shake from time to time to help encourage the gas to go into solution. After one or two days of this, drop the pressure down to 12 psi, depressurize the headspace, wait another 2–3 days, and you’re good to go.
This approach does require that you pay attention. Failing to drop to the serving pressure after a day or two is likely to result in excessively carbonated beer, and you’ll have to purge the headspace one or more times to drop the carbonation level to where you want it, wasting CO2.
The Indecisive
If you can’t really decide what works best for you, then perhaps my favorite method is up your alley. Offering faster carbonation than the set-it-and-forget-it method without the fuss of overpressurization, this hybrid method requires a day of periodic shaking at serving pressure, followed by a few days of neglect. If the serving pressure is 12 psi, then just set the regulator at 12 and give the keg a good shake every couple of hours until you can’t hear gas rushing out of the cylinder. Keep this up for the first day, then forget about the keg for another 4–6 days until it’s time to tap.
With the exception of the priming-sugar method, all of these approaches assume that the kegged beer is cold, as gas more readily dissolves into cold liquids than warm ones. Kegs can be pressurized at room temperature, but you’ll have to wait longer to enjoy your beer.