Can i keg wine

Serving wine from a beer tap may lack the romance of pulling a cork, but filling one Cornelius keg is much easier than filling and corking twenty-five standard mL wine bottles. In addition, since the headspace can be purged with an inert gas — such as nitrogen or carbon dioxide — oxidation is minimized in your kegged wine.

With your wine in a keg, you can have a single glass without opening a whole bottle. Cornelius kegs can be used as holding tanks for wine reserved for topping up barrels or other fermenters. They can also be used as holding tanks for wines destined to be blended.

And — unlike blending from a barrel or carboys — the leftover wine is protected from oxygen, even if there is only a small amount left in the keg. A Cornelius keg is a stainless steel cylinder with an access hatch, which is usually oval, on top. Most Corny kegs have formed rubber pieces at their top and bottom.

The rubber keeps the keg from scratching the surface it sits on and handles are molded into the rubber on top for easy handling. The lid almost always has a pressure relief built into it.

The posts are connected to your gas source and dispensing equipment via quick disconnect fittings. The tubing should be clamped to the regulator and gas in fitting, as the pressures on the gas side can be sufficient to blow the tubing off. Any shop that sells kegging equipment will carry the circular tubing clamps required.

Unless you are planning on carbonating your wine, there is no reason to use clamps on this side. There are two different types of posts found on Cornelius kegs. Kegs of the type used by Pepsi and other soda makers have ball lock posts and require ball lock connectors. The type of kegs used by Coca-Cola have pin lock posts and require pin lock connectors.

The two are not interchangeable. Ball lock Pepsi kegs are more common these days, but both types can usually be found in most homebrew shops.

If you get more than one Corny keg, it pays to keep them all of the same type. The most common size of Cornelius keg is 5 gallons 19 L , although other sizes — including 2. Larger keg sizes make nice fermenters. How much less depends on their condition. Reconditioned kegs will have the rubber O-ring that seals the lid — as well as the little O-rings that seal the posts — replaced. These gaskets will smell like soda syrup if they have not been replaced. They may also be brittle and prone to cracking.

Reconditioned kegs may also have the spring-loaded valves within the posts, called poppet valves, replaced. Reconditioned kegs should hold pressure and are often shipped pressurized. A quick pull of the pressure-relief valve should yield a blast of gas from the keg.

Reconditioned kegs are usually cleaned inside and can be quickly cleaned and made ready to use. You could use some of those collapsible water bottles. This would give you something similar to the boxed wines where as you use it, the bag gets smaller.

This prevents air from getting introduced into the wine and you can dispose of it rather than having to clean it afterwards nice feature for lazy brewers. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.

It's absolutely possible to do so. The main thing you have to watch out for is oxidation. Hope that helps out a bit. Improve this answer. Is CO2 just as good as Nitrogen for this? Why would one pick one over the other? What is the difference between Nitrogen and CO2 in this context for kegs? They are both inert no oxygen.

Why does everybody use Nitrogen? I said it in the answer - because Nitrogen is much less soluble than CO2 - only use CO2 if you want fizzy wine. Ok, got it. Aside from the higher carbonation of CO2, is there any other difference? Will it degrade in any manner the wine if it sits on CO2 for a year or so? My interest is to have a small CO2 keg to top off my bigger barrels; the wine isn't consumed right then, so the fizziness would dissipate naturally. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google.

They also usually require very thorough cleaning and some replacement parts, which eats into the savings. All winemaking equipment has to be both clean and sanitary before use, and your kegs are no exception. Kegs are cleaned through the access hatch on top.

Once inside, clean the keg with an appropriate product for use on stainless steel, scrubbing the interior surfaces thoroughly. Take the gasket off of the lid and soak and scrub it as well.

This will involve undoing the gas in and liquid out ports using a socket wrench. You can tackle many of them with a crescent wrench, but be careful not to strip them. Many homebrew shops carry the appropriate keg wrenches, and some may even loan them out for good customers.

Place these and the ports into a small bowl of cleaning solution and give them a scrub with a small brush. You may have to replace the poppet valves in used kegs. From the liquid out port the dip tube will slide straight up and out of the keg.

It should be scrubbed inside and out. To get the inside, folks who own firearms are at a distinct advantage as they already possess the tools for cleaning the interior of long, small-diameter tubes. The rest of us can make do with a very tiny wad of cloth on a piece of dental floss, or perhaps very careful not to scratch! Cornelius keg systems were designed to be filled with carbonated soda pop and the liquid pressurized out of the keg with carbon dioxide gas.

But fear not! Tanks of nitrogen gas can be found at stores that sell compressed gas — welding shops and fire supply places are a good bet, and there are specialty companies that cater to gas users. You can also get regulators at advanced homebrewing shops. All of the other hardware tubing, connectors, clamps, cobra taps, etc. Aging is an extremely complex phenomenon, not perfectly understood in all aspects.

Wine that is bottled with a stinky smell will be exactly as stinky months or years later. This threw some winemakers for a loop when screw caps first went into use. Reductive wines that normally finished out under cork, where a tiny bit of oxygen exchange cleaned up the sulfur notes, stayed unrepentantly stinky, offending critics and hurting sales.

It took some producers a while to sort this out, but the smart ones got it the first time. Bottom line: Your wine should be in peak condition, clear, stable, and ready to drink before you keg it. For the dispensing side, you have a couple of options. The simplest is to run plastic tubing from the liquid out fitting disconnect to a cobra tap. While the line could be any length you choose, around 6 inches 15 cm will do just fine.

Before you fill your keg with wine you need to purge it of oxygen. Seal the lid on the keg and open the valve on the top of the nitrogen tank. Set the gauge pressure to 3—4 PSI and leave the valve open until you hear the gas flow stop.