It happens to every home brewer at some point or another. Premature Kegging – or worse – Premature Bottling. Luckily recovering from premature kegging is a lot easier than premature bottling. I’ve heard of techniques where caps are carefully lifted so as to keep the seal but allow over-pressure out, but I wouldn’t try it. Kegging is simple – you just let it ferment out and enjoy the free CO2, and back the pressure off if it goes too far. But it’s always a bummer when you don’t check your gravity regularly and think that enough time has passed. I forgot that I didn’t use the normal SafeAle american ale yeast on this Red that I put together recently. The kind I used, which I don’t remember, ferments a little slower. So like an idiot, I grabbed my keg (standard corny keg with ball locks) and got to sanitizing.
Guess what else I forgot? I forgot to depressurize the keg from the previous batch – which of course was a porter – and holy crap what a mess:
When I sanitize, I always remove all the attachments, and gaskets and let them soak in solution. Then I rinse all the left over beer out with hot tap water until the water runs clear. I rinse so water comes out the holes and strategically rinse and drain allowing steam to infiltrate everything. Once that is done, I siphon a gallon of sanitizer in the keg:
After that, I’ll put the main gasket back in place and swish it all around until I got a nice froth going. I’ll plug the air in and liquid out ports with my fingers and rock it back and forth – then pop the main gasket again and dump the solution back into my gallon pitcher. Then I rinse with hot water until suds stop coming out of the keg, making sure to hit everywhere with scalding hot water to a point of redundancy. When that’s done I’ll put the main gasket back in and then put the keg on standby, with solution soaked paper towels over the air in liquid out ports:
Oh and hey, another amateur move is to think that both of the ports take the same ball lock attachments- They are NOT universal (also been there done that). Rule of thumb is to look at the little notches on ‘wrenching’ portion of the attachments:
At this point, I began doing what I’ll do FIRST from now on… getting the carboy elevated for checking the final gravity and siphoning… Pardon the mess and the blatant free advertising for V8, Glad bags, BJs and Friskies…
I grabbed my wine theif and pulled three theifs full into the graduated cylinder that I have…
Shit! it’s still at almost 1.020! that’s not ready by any means! dammit!
Quickly, I packed up the keg and stuck it in the corner and started scrubbing and sanitizing a carboy!
Well, it looks like I’ll have to wait another 2 weeks before I’m comfortable kegging – what a waste of time, but a good thing came out of this – I don’t know if I racked this beer! well, it’s racked now! Look at that color! yummy! – oh and the taste? not bad at all! looking forward to the final product!
