Me And The Homebrews: Kegging

Making beer is as much about taste as it is about sustenance. Beer, properly made without fillers, is like drinking a loaf of bread. It is the yield of the grain, the staff of life. What can be more basic than wheat beer?

On this edition of Me and the Homebrews, WBN chronicles the making of a Dunkelweizen, or dark wheat, beer.

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Today was kegging day. Our Dunkenweizen has matured in the primary fermenter for a week and the secondary fermenter for 4 additional weeks.

Even after moving to the second carboy, we ended up with a lot of precipitate. Check out the two inches of trub at the bottom of the carboy -- that's what we got after leaving an inch or more in the first carboy.

Still we got a nice wheaty light brown beer. We tasted it and it tastes fine: miles better than last time we did this same beer.

We currently have no CO2 to put in the keg, so the beer is essentially flat. We will rectify that soon enough. More troubling is we performed a leak test on the keg due to the problems we've been having with the pressure. Sure enough, it is not airtight at the top where the lid goes. Not sure if it is an O-ring problem or the keg itself is misshapen.

This leak is the source of the lack of pressure to be sure, and a likely candidate for contributing to the terrible taste last time. This is only the third time we've used the keg, so I don't know if it was defective from the start, since all of us drank the first batch so quickly.

This needs fixing and soon.

Keg goes in the fridge pictured in the background.

The other casualty was we broke the hydrometer while cleaning up. My bad, I put it in the brew pot which was filled with sanitizer for this operation and forgot to remove it before I moved the pot upstairs to clean. The hydrometer is filled with metal at the bottom, not mercury like a thermometer -- thank goodness!

Fortunately, we got a final gravity reading first: F.G. 1.02 (O.G. was 1.044) which gives us an ABV of 5%. That's your average beer strength and this is an average style of beer.