Before anyone redirects me, I have diligently searched through the whole forum looking for answers. Some have partly answered my question but not to the point where I understand it beyond a shadow of a doubt. I have been bottling for about 10 years now and I must admit that I have not really looked into the kegging part of home brewing too much due to the Military moving me around the world every couple of years. Bottles are easy to find in foreign countries, CO2 is not. So can someone please tell me why my bottles take longer to be ready to drink than someone who kegs. Same recipe, 7 days primary, 7-10 days secondary, 2 weeks in bottle OR 2-3 days in keg and ready to drink. Why? Does the CO2 some how speed up the maturation period of beer or what? I don’t mean the carbonation either. I mean the actually drinkability of the beer. If I was to drink one of my bottles 2-3 days after, it would be horrible. Please help me understand this.
The only reason I can think of that bottle conditioned beers taste like hell 2 days after bottling would be that due to the yeast fermenting the priming sugar, the beer would maybe taste odd.
When kegging, you are simply forcing co2 into solution NOT expecting the yeast to eat any new sugar, as there isn’t any.
So kegging is only faster at getting co2 in solution, that’s it. Well it’s also better at obtaining wicked hop aroma, but that’s another post. Also, you could seriously save yourself time and hassle by skipping the secondary and treating the kegs AS a secondary that you will easily serve from later. Things to consider. Kegging is expensive, no doubt about it, but once you have it, you’ll wonder why u waited.
Adding sugar to the bottles unbalances the the beer’s character. If you were to bottle unprimed and keg without adding CO2 you would essentially have the same tasting beer. Kegging will not speed up the maturation process. In a keg, CO2 is added and forced into the beer. Bottle priming you have to wait and let the yeast create it.
BTW, you can prime in a keg just like with bottles but without CO2 you won’t be able to dispense it.
Does that help?
Since you don’t keg, you don’t know if your beer would taste good after only a couple of days in the keg. If you’re comparing your bottled beer to someone who kegs, it’s quite possible that they do an entirely different process; for instance, I typically leave the beer in the primary for three weeks with the last week sitting on dryhops, then cold-crash for a couple of days to drop the hops and sediment, keg, and put on the gas - when it’s carbed it’s ready to drink.
Using the same process, when I bottle it still takes at least a week for the beer to carb, then a couple of days more in the fridge to drop the yeast to the bottom, and only then does it taste like the kegged beer.
