I’ve been kegging from day 1 and when I bottle, it’s from the keg. HOWEVER, I made a 5-gallon batch the other day with a first timer and he wants to naturally carbonate 1/2 of it in bottles to learn all aspects of the trade. Here’s what I plan on doing:
Chill my primary bucket outside for a few hours to develop chill haze. It has fermented for 3+ weeks already.
Rack from primary into a keg, on top of a hot gelatin solution.
Push 2.5gallons from keg (with CO2) into a bottling bucket, on top of 2oz of hot priming sugar solutions.
Bottle from the bottling bucket.
Question: will the bottles naturally carbonate properly, or will the gelatin mess this up? I’m sure my keg will be fine and clear. The beer is an amber ale, ~1.050 OG.
Gelatin will not hurt priming. I’ve bottle conditioned lagers that have been in fermenter for 4-6 weeks, then got gelatin, without additional yeast.
Any reason you want to transfer from the primary to keg then keg to bottling bucket? You could just mix the gelatin with the priming sugar solution for his half (1/4 pack for 2.5 gallons).
A minor suggestion: it would be preferred to cold crash this for a couple of days first to fully develop the chill haze prior to fining. It may help the finings work better, but I’ve honestly never tried it both ways.
Thanks. I didn’t realize it would take a whole day or more for the chill haze to appear.
I guess I’m doing it this way way for three reasons: 1) so I only have to transfer with the siphon once and and not stop the siphon midway through its transfer from primary 2) so any hops, yeast, etc that make it into the keg will make their way out early on their transfer to the bottling bucket and 3) so the gelatin can help clear out the beer in the bottles.
