Question on filling pressure barrel

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Seasider

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Maybe this is a silly question, but how much beer should I put into a 9 litre plastic pressure barrel?

Fill to top? 2" from top? 4"? First top band? Don't want to underfill/overfill with obvious pressure implications.

Any advice welcome.

Thanks.
 
If it was sold as a 9l PB then 9l is probably its beer capacity.

get a measuring jug and see how many litres it will contain.

You need a good headroom circa 1/3 of the volume of the barrel to contain pressurised co2 from the fermentation to condition the brew and to provide the force to push out your beer without depleting the pressure and sucking air back in as bubbles thru the tap aka 'the glug of death!' as the air is highly likely to oxidise the beer requireing drinking it within a day or two before its gone off.

so i would suggest filling with 9l and marking the level with a sharpie or similar..
 
As Fil says. The more headroom there is the better chance that the pressure will hold til the beer gets down to the tap.
If you run out of pressure when the barrel's half empty, don't let air glug in, but remove the cap and add priming sugar and leave it for a couple of days to build pressure again. Doesn't hurt the beer.
 
in my opinion the 9 litre PB which if it looks like the budget 5 gallon PB is useless for conditioning ale in.have one tried it many times and for me the plastic isn't rigid enough so expands very quickly under very low pressure,mine sits redundant in the shed,one day it may get used for homebrew wine if swmbo can goad me into making some:lol:
 
When I check it's actually a 10 litre barrel. I have two so I filled the other with 10 litres of water and it rather coincidentally came up to the top 'band'.

I only kegged my brew an hour or so ago so I slacked off the cap, and drew out 4 500ml bottles to bring it down.

I left the priming as was - it's a Nog and I don't like it fizzy.

Thanks for your advices!
 
I've just put 21 litres into a budget '5 gallon barrel' (5 galls is just under 23 litres) and the headspace by calculation has a volume of about 3 litres. I occasionally put 22 litres into same PB.
So if you roughly prorate this I would be putting no more than 9 litres in a PB which has an overall capacity of 10 litres.
In my view there is no need to start with a large headspace, provided you don't overprime and stay within the design pressure, with the backstop that the PB has a pressure relief device of some sort however basic.
 
3l?? i will admit to not having used a pb since the very early 90's and had a couple of then 15 yr old beerspheres and a couple of boots barrels too, and my estimation of the headroom is based on recollection of filling those beasts which may have had a significantly higher volume of headspace than the modern equivalents Or my memory is totally shot.. the later is a viable option..
 

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