Kegging Your Beer

So, you've made your beer and now you're ready to put it into a keg. First thing's first, have a clean and sanitized keg. To have an oxygen free environment for your beer, fill your keg with sanitizer, connect your gas line to the gas post, and a beverage line to the beverage post. Using your CO2, push ALL of the sanitizer out of the keg. This ensures that you have a completely sanitized keg that is now full of CO2.

Disconnect the gas and beverage lines from the keg posts. For an oxygen free transfer, connect tubing from the spigot of your fermenter to a ball-lock (or pin-lock) beverage quick-disconnect.

Now that you have a line connecting your fermenter to a keg beverage disconnect, pull the pressure relief valve on the top of your keg to relieve the pressure inside. Now, connect the beverage disconnect to your keg. To start the flow of beer into the keg, turn your spigot valve to the 'on' position and remove your airlock from your fermenter. 

While this is going to add a small amount of oxygen to the top of your fermenter as the beer goes into the keg, it should be negligible with minimal risk of oxidization. However, for a truly oxygen-free transfer, you can connect your gas out disconnect to your keg and run a gas line to the airlock hole of your fermenter to create a loop in which the CO2 remaining in your keg can displace the beer that is leaving your fermenter.

Different beers require different levels of carbonation, but generally, if you set your pressure regulator to your keg to 10PSI, you should have drinkable beer within about a week.

If you can't wait quite that long, our friends at Homebrew 4 Life have a great YouTube tutorial video on carbonating your beer and having it ready to drink in just under an hour.

Congratulations, now that you've carbonated your keg of beer, you're finally ready to drink it! Tap the keg and pour yourself a well deserved pint!