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5) To fill your keg with your homebrew you will need to clean and sanitize it first. A general pre-sani-
tizing cleaning of the keg can be performed by scrubbing the inside with a scotch brite pad or carboy
brush (if you can’t reach into the keg). Remember that you always must clean before you sanitize. Do
not use chlorine to sanitize stainless steel as the bleach can pit the stainless steel. Star San (CL26),
IO Star (CL36), or Sani Clean (CL27) are the recommended sanitizers. We also recommend that you
remove the valving and lids and sanitize those as well.
6) After filling your keg and reattaching the lid flush the headspace with CO2 by filling with CO2 and
releasing the valve on top of the keg lid. Do this 3–5 times to effectively remove the oxygen from the
keg.
Carbonation
Carbonation is influenced by both temperature and pressure. The lower the temperature of the liquid,
the higher CO2 pressure, and the more surface area for contact between the liquid and CO2, the easier
CO2 goes into solution. Thus the fastest way to carbonate your beer is to chill it down as much as pos-
sible, turn the CO2 to about 30 lbs p.s.i., and shake it for around 3 minutes. A better quick method is
to use the chart below. Select your temperature and desired volume of CO2 (2.2–2.7 is a good range to
start with) and shake the keg until no more CO2 goes into solution. For those who want to carbonate
like the pros (quickly, with precision, and without shaking), we do sell a carbonation stone. It hooks
to the inside of the CO2 in valve and hangs to the bottom of the keg. The stainless steel stone releases
thousands of .5–2 micron bubbles of CO2, creating so much surface area that the CO2 is instantly
absorbed into solution until saturation is reached at whatever level of carbonation you choose.
The paragraph above explains how to carbonate fast when you need it quick, but just like bottling,
your beer is going to benefit from a week or two of aging. What most people who keg do, is hook the
keg up at whatever pressure CO2 they are going to dispense at, on average around 8–12 psi. Leave
it on, in the refrigerator, for 1–2 weeks after which time the beer will be carbonated. Our personal
method of carbonation is to keep our refrigerator at around 38 degrees. We hook up the gas line as-
sembly to the keg, adjust pressure to 10 psi, and leave it for one week.
A keg of beer can be thought of as having two parts: the beer (liquid) and the headspace (gas). These
two parts want to equalize the pressure ... your beer will keep accepting CO2 until the pressures are
equal. If you leave your flat beer with 30 psi of CO2 in the headspace, you will eventually end up with
fizz as the beer keeps accepting CO2 into solution in an attempt to equalize the pressures. If you have
a carbonated beverage of any sort (beer, soda, seltzer) and you have no pressure in the headspace
the CO2 comes out of solution to try and equalize the pressure between the liquid and the gas (head-
space). You witness this every time you buy a 2 liter soda bottle and it goes flat in a few days. So the
idea is to equalize them at the carbonation level you prefer. The easiest way to do this is to carbonate
at the pressure you dispense. It may take a couple of days longer, but your beer ages and clears and
dispenses very nicely without foaming problems.
Serving your beer: After drawing off the first few pints, all the sediment around the dip tube in the
bottom will be drawn off and you will start to get clear beer. A nice benefit of the keg is since it is con-
stantly aging at a very cold temperature, the chill haze you see when you chill a bottle of homebrew
will settle out within a few weeks.
