Counter Flow Bottling

Now that I have kegged my beer I run into the issue of how to transport the beer to another location. I feel the best way is to bottle the beer. But herein lies the problem. How to get the beer from the tap to the bottle. If you just try to pour the beer into a bottle you get about 1/3 beer and 2/3 foam. This is due to a sharp pressure difference. One way to solve this issue is a counter pressure filler.

Now they make really fancy counter flow filler that you can buy. MoreBeer sells one for $70. I thought perhaps I could rig something up cheaper. So, the plan was to buy a stopper that fit over a bottle, drill a hole through it to fit a racking cane through it and attach the racking cane to the tap. You can then fill the bottles by burping the pressure from the bottle. I found an example of all this on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx2-OMyb8fc

Sometimes I drag Ellie into this hobby of mine and I thought this would be a good excuse to hang together so I pulled her into this. We go together to Home Depot to get a stopper. She was smart enough to ask for help and we found what we needed. This is why I bring her along. After that I went home to drill a hole in the stopper and she got busy doing work stuff.

I didn't have the right sized drill so I try to improvise. The last thing I try is to attach a barrel sander to the Dremmel and ram it through. This in effect burns the rubber. The size may have been right but when I push the racking cane through all I get a black, gross rubber smeared all over the racking cane. So, I pull it off and have to scrub the racking cane really well to get the rubber off. It now looks more whitish on that spot of the cane and I'm sure all those little scratches that I made in the plastic when trying to get the rubber off will now harbor bacteria like a champ so I need to replace it someday.

Anyhow now it is obvious that I need a new plan and I grab Ellie invite her to come with me to work where there is machine shop and we can use a nice drill press and a variety of drill bits. So, we get there and everything goes as planned. We drill the stopper. It fits great. As we are leaving though she spots the eye wash station and out of curiosity opens it up to look in. Well, these stations are a one time use only type of thing. As soon as someone opens it some plastic tabs break off and activate the saline bags which now pour out like a water fountain. She frantically tries to stop the flow but with no luck. She ends up feeling real bad about the whole thing. I've got to keep my eye on her in the future. Anyhow, I went to work the next day and told the office manager about it. She found it a funny story. Back to the counter flow though.

So we get home and rig this thing up and it works great. I even used it to fill six bottles of Elf King Ale for poker night and took them over to the boys. They seemed to enjoy the beer.