Way to fill bottles:

MiniBrew promotes the portable keg to take with you, but of course it might also be handy to fill a few bottles every now and then. Here are a few possibilities to consider. It enables you to fill and cap bottles with carbonated beer.

MiniBrew uses a beergun (check this video) to fill bottles e.g. a MiniBrew Weizen that was bottled for a contest. There are multiple tools and easy options available when it comes to filling. The classic way of doing it follows...

**Bottling procedure (from carbonated keg)**

A cheap an easy way to bottle beer from the (carbonated) keg can be found in this video or use this tool.

For those of you foaming, here are some tricks:

1. Use COLD bottles.
2. drop your keg temp down close to freezing.
3. use a really long beer line.
4. drop your psi down to 4ish.

Remark by Eelco: I have botteled quite a few bottles with forced carbonated beer and tried several methods but it is always messy, loosing a lot of beer. \*update\* I bought and tested this tool and I was able to fill bottles without loosing a lot of beer.

**Bottling uncarbonated beer**

If you bottle before carbonation, it can be much easier as there's no gas to cause issues with froth. After the primary fermentation has finished just abort the minibrew session just before bottling.

I found the following combination of equipment works...I've included links to websites as it took me ages to work this out and kept getting things wrong.

0. You'll need a large, watertight plastic container for sanitising everything. Chuck stuff in here at the beginning that might tough the beer (except the bottle sanitiser machine) I'd also always wear rubber gloves when bottling. Sanitiser is not nice stuff and you're using it a lot, everything is pretty much covered in it.

Source for airtight plastic box

1. Bottling wand. I went for stainless steel one because of the pressure. Not sure if plastic would work just as well. Important to check the diameter for the end that connects onto a hose. My one comes apart to make cleaning easier.

Sourcing a bottling wand

2. Plastic tube from bottling wand. This needs to fit onto both the bottling wand and the keg ball lock adaptor (ideally the black ones you already have with minibrew). You just need to match the internal diameter to both the wand and adaptor. I found 9mm internal diameter worked well. It should be food grade.

Sourcing a plastic tube.

3. Connecting the tube, bottling wand and keg. I used little clips to hold both ends in place. Without that the pressure makes it too risky.

Sourcing clips

4. Cleaning the bottles...I have a bottle tree but actually there's no real need with 10 bottles at a time. I wouldn't buy this again. You'll also need a bottle rinser and chemisan (starsan substitute as it doesn't seem to be avialable in the UK/ Europe right now).

Sourcing a bottle tree, bottle rinser,

5. Gas. You can use the little bulbs, which you can get from Minibrew. Very hard to find in the UK. You can also get a gas canister to save costs and make CO2 less of a scarce commodity. I had to ask 3 different gas companies if they'd sell me a canister in a simple way - one was great. The c.3kg one is easily big enough for our purposes.

Source for threaded 16g CO2 bulbs and CO2 canister (London only I think).

6. Connecting up a gas cannister. You'll need a gas regulator, a tube and fitting to the keg from the tube. John Guest fittings were recommended to me as they're easy to assemble and high quality. This exact combination works well. If you substitute be very careful to make sure it all fits together...

Source for John Guest connector keg tap, gas regulator , pvc tube

Watch a suitable YouTube video on how to use the gas canister. There are loads.

7. Adding priming sugar. Lots of sites tell you how much to add for different types of beer. Such as Brewers Friend. This can be done by adding sugar solution to the keg, adding sugar to each bottle or adding sugar solution to each bottle. Adding sugar solution to each bottle seems like the best solution as it avoids exposing the keg to oxygen and is easier than sugar into each bottle. I create 100ml of sugar solution and split it into each bottle.

(Remark by Eelco: adding 1.8 gram of sugar per 300 ml bottle works fine for me -> 6 gram per liter)

8. Carbon dioxide in each bottle. I'm not convinced this is necessary, but I guess why take the risk. You fill each bottle with CO2 (from a CO2 bulb is easiest, similar to filling the trubb container with CO2 before connecting it to the keg when fermenting).

9. Capping, just buy caps with good reviews and a capper. I don't like my capper, it's not a great fit and a bit too tight so getting it back off each cap after it's applied to the bottle is annoying (and risks loosening the cap). So no link here but I'd recommend this style of capping machine. The handheld ones will inevitably go wrong at some stage I think...

Source for capping machine (not the one I bought)