Bottle from the Keg - The DIY Beer Gun

Whether you enter your 12 oz bottles into competitions or love to share your creations via a six-pack, there is no better way to spread the love than with a beer gun. No, it is not a super-soaker full of beer! The DIY beer gun is a tool that will allow all you lucky keg owners to bottle your brew, without priming sugar, yeast sediment or forethought. Learn how after the jump.

I wish I could tell you I thought of this on my own, but I am not sure I have that sort of mental prowess. As far as I know, a very popular user over at homebrewtalk.com created it and has spread his creation's utilitarian joy all over the internet - let us spread it some more!

The directions are rather long, this deterred me for a while so I will shorten them up for you! Let us begin with what will be required:

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Materials
A keg system (duh)
5 feet of liquid line
1 liquid ball-lock disconnect (or pin)
1 cobra tap
2 hose clamps
1 bottling wand
1 #2 stopper, with hole
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Assembly of all but the keg system will be an easy task, hopefully you already have that part in place. First we will be creating the cobra tap line; connect the liquid line to the barb of the ball-lock and slide on both clamps, tighten down one of them to secure the disconnect. Now connect the cobra tap to the other end of the line and secure with second clamp that you already put on the hose. Second; cut the bottling wand above the spring mechanism, to remove it, at a angle so it looks like a hypodermic needle (a dremel works best, but a serrated knife will suffice). The only thing that remains is to insert the wand into the mouth of the cobra tap and slide on the stopper - perfect fit, right? Before you do that, notice the cobra tap setup, any bells going off? Yes, now you have an extra way to dispense beer at or away from your fancy-pants Perlick taps!

Bottling is not much harder than assembly. Chill some sanitized bottles, place them in a container larger than them (a deep tray or simply a stein if you are doing one bottle at a time), connect your bottling gun and lower your keg's pressure to as low as you can get it. The only tricky part is minimizing foam. The gun will do most of the work by eliminating the turbulence. You will, however, need to help the beer along by keeping a good seal between the bottle and stopper until the beer slows down, once it does, use your thumb to release a bit of the built op pressure and continue until the bottle is full.

There are some Tricks to help you along your way. The first is to make sure your C02 is very low, I usually just disconnect my gas line and purge the tank to almost nothing. When the beer stops coming out fast enough I just give the tank a quick shot of C02 before disconnecting again. The second would be to always top off your bottles and cap on foam or liquid. This ensures that almost no oxygen will remain in the bottle and will help to keep the carbonation level exactly the same as the beer in the keg.

That will do it! Good luck and enjoy your beer gun and new cobra tap. You are now able to take the party on the road via keg or bottles. Hey, you might even submit to and win some contests! If you'd rather just buy a setup, checkout MoreBeer.com's collection of beer guns.

Cheers

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