Easy Kegging of Your Home Brew with iKegger | Forget Bottling

[We are not associated with Coopers or any other supplier of home brew ingredients, we use this name as it is synonymous with extract brewing nearly the world over so it is what people search for when looking for information about extract brewing]

For decades Coopers Home Brew has been one of the world’s most beloved brands in the beer world. They are easily the most recognisable name in home brewing and Coopers starter brewing kits have been toiled over in garages around the world. Many brewers never make the jump to biab or all grain brews because Coopers Home Brew Extracts do exactly what they say on the label. They produce a decent, drinkable beer with minimal work in the brewing process for peanuts (around $6-8 for a case of stubbies).

The only downside to your Coopers Home Brew (if you're happy with the quality of the beer) is bottling day. Bottling quickly becomes a full-time occupation. You find yourself collecting and washing every left over stubby you see and getting annoyed at anyone who uses a bottle opener on a twist top cap. Your garage and shed become stacked with boxes of bottles in various stages of reclamation for your brew, some rinsed, some with labels scrubbed off, some ready for sterilisation.

Then it comes to the actual day and the real work begins. Every bottle needs to be cleaned, inspected for chips or cracks, sanitised and somehow stacked without touching anything that will re-introduce bacteria. You end up with giant Christmas tree like creations with brown and green glass leaves hanging off them everywhere. Then each bottle needs either dextrose measured into it or carbonation drops added. Alternatively (hot tip, this is much easier!), you need to rack your brew into a bottling bucket with a sugar syrup to bulk prime your brew. This brings the added risk of contamination and oxidation during the transfer though.

A standard Coopers brew usually makes 23L so you now need to bottle 72 stubbies, individually filling them carefully to the correct level with a siphon or racking cane, capping them and moving them to where you will store them to age for a month or so to carbonate.

Usually after a while home brewers start to look towards kegging. Who doesn’t love the idea of fresh beer on tap at home? Unfortunately, the start-up price of a kegging kit can be a major sticking point, especially if there is a Financial Control Officer looking over your shoulder! The kegs themselves are reasonably priced, you can get a brand new 19L keg for under $140 and second hand coke syrup kegs for about $75 (I don’t recommend this, I got one and after scrubbing and doing 3 brews it still smells like syrup).

The problem is that you then need all the other parts.

To force carbonate, you need to chill the keg (the second-best thing about kegging, after fresh beer on tap, is not having to wait for it to carbonate naturally). For that you’ll need a separate fridge that fits the keg in it (or to take all your food out of your fridge for a couple of days).

You’ll also need a CO2 bottle, regulator and beer lines, possibly a manifold or second regulator if you want to pour one keg while carbonating a second one.

You’ll need taps, and, unless you want to drag the keg out of the fridge every time you want to pour a beer, you’ll need to install fonts on the fridge or fork out for a kegerator.

All up you are usually looking at around the $1300 mark to be ready to keg your 1^st brew.

• By getting a 19L keg and the 4L package you have all the benefits of a full keg system without needing a fridge or kegerator, gas bottle etc.
• A 23L keg package (19L and 4L kegs) replaces 72 stubbies and can be washed and sanitised, filled and stored in minutes.
• Link the kegs together to fill from your fermenter with zero chance of infection. See our video page for a how to video.
• You can be drinking carbonated beer straight from primary fermentation (although beer will get better with ageing).
• Simply store the 19L keg in the garage filled with flat beer from the fermenter. Fill the 4L keg from it and carbonate it using the mini regulator and 16g co2 canister or a Soda Stream bottle in the fridge overnight.
• A 4L keg easily fits lying down on a shelf in slightly more space than a wine bottle or longneck but holds 12 stubbies.
• Any of our kits can include the fermentasauras conical fermenter either with or instead of the 19L keg, these have the advantage of being both a fermenter and a keg, check out this video for us doing a brew start to finish in one!

• If you expand even further you can have multiple 19L kegs in the garage and multiple 4L kegs in the fridge with different beers in them.
• Forget collecting bottles and caps, forget smashed glass and exploding bottles, forget annoying capping machines or competing for space in the fridge with unimportant things like groceries.
• Be the envy of your home brew crew when they turn up with recycled bottles they had to scrub the labels off and you have beautiful, shiny, steel kegs with an integrated CO2 tapping system you can take anywhere.
• For those who don't think that 4L is enough beer to have ready to drink in the fridge check out our brand new 2 x 10L keg package, these allow you to fit 20L of beer on a single shelf in your fridge with one keg carbonating while you drink the other!