My son and I brewed a batch of New England IPA yesterday. It was a 6 gallon batch we will split between two 3 gallon kegs. I found a way looking online to apply co2 to the blow off fitting on my SS brewtech bucket and then apply just enough pressure to push the beer out into a purged keg. Looks pretty easy. My challenge is we want to distribute the beer between the two kegs and I would like to have an equal “mixture” in both, meaning not the bottom of the fermenter in one and the top in the other. Do you think just adding a “Y” fitting in the beer line would somewhat equally distribute the beer? It doesn’t need to be perfect just don’t want an obvious split in the batch.
Personally I think your overthinking it. But you could just switch the lines back and forth. I don’t think the t would work exactly. It’s the same beer what are you worried about?
Well I read “somewhere” that you could see a difference in taste if you just put half in one keg and half in the other (coming directly from the primary to the kegs here). So I thought maybe the beer would be a bit different from top of the fermentor to the bottom. So I wanted to make sure I got a good cross section of the whole batch in each small keg. Ya, prob overthinking, but i did read something about it and I cant remember the term they used to describe it. It may have been “stratification”. Its a NEIPA so there will be a pile of hops at the bottom of the fermenter. I may just pick up a tee fitting and see how it works out.
ya it won’t cost anything but 2 bucks for the t fitting and a little tubing. seems the NEIPA oxygen prevention topic is a very intense one. I like the beer, although not a big fan of the murky look of it. With all the hops and paranoia about oxygen, I am not sure I will be a frequent brewer of it.
I’d do what you can to push the brew out of the fermentor with CO2, use a TEE, hook them up to the liquid side of your kegs and go… IF stratification is a worry along with trub, then I’d rack to a keg to get it off its lees, then into your keg splitting setup… As for the murky brews… a ceramic mug is fabulous to deal with that… Sneezles61
So I was so paranoid about the oxygenation of the NEIPA that I thought , hey lets wait till we keg them to cold crash. Got my new T splitter all set up and theoretically would have worked perfectly however there was so much hop material in the primary I could not even get a flow out the bottom of my SS BrewBucket (not even while applying a couple psi of gas through the top blow off fitting). So… I resorted to the old racking cane/ siphon and got about half of each 3 gallon keg filled and then that struggled and stopped.
So then I really screwed the pooch and poured the rest through a screened funnel into the kegs leaving behind quite a bit of “stuff”. Good thing no one was home to hear me cussing in the basement… even the dog looked concerned when I came upstairs, but threw him a treat and he was a happy camper.
So I swore this would be my first and last NEIPA. I should have just cold crashed as usual before the transfer. but even then I am not sure that the internal racking arm would have been above the crap (8 oz of hops in the primary during fermentation) but at least the siphon would have worked.
could have bagged the hops I guess, but most of what I have seen with this style calls for dumping the loose pellets right into the krausen.
Have to rethink this one for a while… Hopefully the beer will be drinkable. Just dry hopped in the kegs so we shall see in a couple of weeks or so if it is salvageable. I will prob have to push the first couple of pints out with 25psi to get the crap through the line.
Oh well, another learning experience is all it is.
We’ve all had one of those brews where it just does not go as planned. I like your attitude about though. Chalk it up to experience and learn something so that the next time you do this recipe you have a better idea of what to do. You will still end up with beer in the end. Hope it is to your liking.
Good idea. I would like to read more about how people are brewing this beer. I am sure there are ways to avoid what I experienced. I am hoping the brulosophy crew dive deeper into the NEIPA for some exbeeriments.
Well since I planned to bring one of the 3 gal NEIPA kegs in to my son this weekend I figured before disturbing the kegs and mixing all the settled stuff around, I would pull a little off the bottom to reduce this stuff. The beer looked great ( in that NEIPA way…) and tasted great.
So far it is good even after the disastrous transfer earlier. It will prob go fast so maybe that will minimize any oxygenation issues.
Sounds like a frustrating day yet a learning experience that we’ve all had in one way or another @tominboston . I bag all of my hops from kettle to keg and have been brewing all NEIPA’s lately with no issues. Most recipes do call for that dry hop around day 2 of fermentation but I’ve yet to try that and just dry hop in the keg. Curious to see how that will change the beer.
Looks great! yes I would love to see the Brulosophy team do an exbeeriment with hops loose in the primary during fermentation and just standard dry hop in a bag in the keg.
