Partial bottling with the rest in a barrel

[singlespeedsteve]

Hi,

I'm just about to come to the end of the fermentation of my first ever brew and I'm looking at what comes next.
My starter kit from wilkinsons came with an FV without a tap and a pressure barrel with a tap.
I'm beginning to think that a whole barrel might be a bit too much for me to drink my way through before it started to go off.
How long does a beer keep In a barrel?

I've come up with an idea, not a new idea I imagine, and wondered if it's even possible.
Can I syphon my beer off to the barrel, batch prime in there and then bottle off about 24 bottles, probably the 500ml PET ones with a screw cap, leaving the rest in the barrel to drink from there once conditioned?
This leaves me with the bottles for some future point to drink at my pleasure

Using the barrel this way would allow me to attach a little bottler stick so I don't have to try and attach a little bottler to a syphon which seems a recipe for disaster.

Thanks
Steve

 

[SloeBrewer]

Beer should keep for a long time in a barrel, so long as you don't introduce any air, in which case it will go off in days. As you pour pints out of your barrel, the initial pressure set up by the second fermentation will drop. Once pressure drops too low, there is nothing to force the beer out, so gravity is doing the work and air will glug back through the tap. So, you need to change the cap for one with a valve, so you can inject a bulb of CO2, once the pressure drops. This will keep your barrel pressurised, the beer flowing and air out.

While bottling from a tap is very easy, I've also done it using a bottling wand on a syphon tube and it's not really that hard, so long as you don't press then valve at the end, when there's no bottle on there!

The problem I see is that if you only have your keg half full, you'll have a lot of air in there, which needs to be purged. I'm not sure that the pressure from the second fermentation will be enough to force the air out completely (CO2 is heavier and will sit on top of the beer), and you may need to pressurise with a CO2 bulb regardless.

 

[singlespeedsteve]

Thanks for replying. I think, in light of the co2 issue, it might be better to do or the other
I'll get some bottles and a bottling wand and try that for my first go