Greener Brewing

This is simply a personal preference, but in this section I will detail some pros and cons of bottling your beer, and kegging your beer.

As a beginning brewer, I don't know if only bottling is in some way 'a right to passage' or just the way it starts out. Maybe the new brewer is intimidated by the thought of a keg setup, or lack of money to go that route.

Personally, I had a keg fridge before I started brewing, so it made it real easy to start kegging. The main problem I had was inconsistent carbonation levels from one bottle to the next, within the same batch of bottled beer.

After force carbonating my fist kegged beer, I knew this was the easiest and fastest way to precisely carbonate my homebrew. Every beer poured the same and tasted the same. And cornelius kegs are easy to store and cheap to buy.

You can save your beer bottles, but if they have been left with any beer inside, you'll most likey have a hard time cleaning the gunk out of the bottom. Your best bet is to recycle the bottles, get new bottles either by buying beer and saving the bottles or buying new bottles.

Used bottles works just fine, if they're cleaned right after the beer is finished. By reusing beer bottles that you've purchased keeps those out of the landfills. Hopefully they would've been recycled, but many end up in landfills anyway.

Using cornelius kegs to store your beer eliminates the use of bottles, the water used to clean each individual bottle and time required to bottle the batch. The use of bottle caps, and their possible final destination -the landfill.

Cornelius kegs can be used for other purposes also, if you remember in the previous section about water. I have also used corney kegs to lager. It's very easy to adapt an airlock to the keg, and lager in stainless steel.

When lagering in a cornelius keg, you would rack the beer as usual to a sanitized keg, attach all keg plug assemblies and dip tubes. The longer dip tube is not required unless you plan to push the beer to another keg with CO2. I would still use an extra small dip tube, as this is how the poppet valve seals. You still want to have an air tight keg, except for the airlock.

You can pressurize the keg to eliminate any oxygen, purging it a few times. But the less you do this, the less carbon is released into the environment.

Visit the Brew Blog for more information about brewing beer at home.