The keg in question is a cornelius, or "corny" keg, which is the most commonly used keg type among homebrewers. these kegs are repurposed kegs of the sort you used to see filled with Coke, etc. in bars. This one is ours, as modeled by the lovely Donnelly:
So, first order of business when kegging is to sanitise the keg. The first step in that process is to half fill the keg with sanitiser and slosh it around the place, which explains why Donnelly is holding the keg in his hands and somewhat justifies this picture of me looking like a tool:
To properly sanitise a keg, it must be completely disassembled, which allowed me to pretend to be a real man and use that spanner set that has been gathering dust on a shelf since I bought it.
It's also a good idea to run the sanitiser through the lines to make sure there's nothing nasty lurking there.
Then, once that's done, the sanitiser is dumped out and it can be filled with beer! Sweet, delicious beer...
The method of choice for filling the keg is simply to pop off the lid and siphon straight from the carboy into the keg.
There are two points to consider when siphoning beer. The first is not to disturb the sediment at the bottom of the carboy or the beer will taste yeasty.
The second is to pour "quietly", i.e. without splashing the beer. This minimises the exposure of the beer to oxygen and should help keep it from spoiling. If it's done right, the keg should fill silently and the beer should not end up with a head.
When the keg is filled, the lid goes back on and the keg can be stored in a fridge.
There will not be many groceries bought in the Dónall household for some time! Beer is sufficiently nutritious.
One of the advantages of kegging beer is that one does not have to resort to bottle priming, or adding sugar to the beer just before bottling. Bottling in this way should result in the sugar fermenting in the bottle and the CO2 produced should carbonate the beer. There are issues with this method, however, as it is hard to control the carbonation level (the yeast might not really be in good enough condition to ferment all the sugar, for example) and it results in beer with a sediment at the bottom of the bottle. While a small sediment isn't necessarily a bad thing (some people prefer it that way) it becomes problematic to move the bottle without disturbing the sediment and bottles must be stored upright at all times.
The beer we put in the keg was flat when it went in. However, due to the process of forced carbonation, it should be carbonated by tomorrow. In a nutshell, beer can be force carbonated in a keg by hooking up the gas line to the output post on the keg (which would normally have a tap on it). By doing this, the gas is connected through a pipe to the bottom of the keg, instead of the top. By increasing the pressure in the keg and storing it at low temperature, CO2 bubbles up through the beer and is dissolved, resulting in carbonated beer with no sediment.
Having said all this, the fact that the beer was warm and flat didn't prevent us from having a taste (some people even prefer it that way).
Neither one of us has yet died from the beer, but we only had a small glass each. Tomorrow we will taste the finished product, then at some point we will build a contraption for bottling from the keg, involving pressurising glass bottles with CO2, then filling them with beer. At this point, it's hard to tell whether we will die from food poisoning or glass shards to the eyeballs.
