Dave's IPA - in the keg

10 days after starting, I have put Dave's IPA in the keg.  The kegs I use are the 19L "corny" kegs, popular with home brewers. 

Cleaned them up with keg & line cleaner, then sanitised with iodophor.  It's good to do two kegs at once, if you can concoct a fluid-out-to-fluid-out tube, using two black keg connectors, and a short length of tubing.  This allows one to easily transfer cleaning and sanitising fluid from one keg to the other, under gentle CO2 pressure.  Two kegs cleaned for the price of one.... And I've kept the sanitising fluid in the second keg. Will need this keg in another week or two for a second batch I now have underway. More on that in a minute.

Glass carboys have their advantages for brewers, primarily ease of sanitation, and visibility. However, initial cleaning is often difficult, requiring a bent carboy brush and lots of elbow grease. Worse still is the post-primary transfer of beer from the carboy. The only realistic way is to use a syphon, which demands santised hands, a sanitised transfer hose (inside and out), and some good coordination in getting one end of the syphon hose into the beer, and the other to the bottom of the receiving vessel (in my case the corny keg).

As a precaution, I flush my keg with some CO2 before starting the transfer. CO2 is heavier than normal air, so ideally forms a raft at the bottom of the keg. So once the hose end drops down to the keg bottom, and beer starts gushing out, the hope is that most oxygen is sitting above the splash zone, so little oxidation will occur.

Once the beer is in the keg, the headspace is flushed three or so times also, hopefully banishing any O2 for good.

I snuck a little taste of the beer from the syphon tube once done.  A strong toffee note initially, and some papery/flowery hop notes. These need to settle and integrate.

As for the yeast and hop cake at the bottom of the carboy, I decided to take the easy option and reuse it. Bought two tins of Coopers Pale Ale, and 500g of dry malt. Whacked it straight in, and topped up with water. Aiming for a strong Aussie Ale, hopefully taking up any remaining hop characters from the residue and the hop bag (still in the carboy).  May toss in some additional pellets at secondary time, if aroma is needed.

What I forgot (from an earlier post) was the difficulty in getting cold liquid malt extract into a glass carboy. A big tip: always, always immerse the malt tins in hot water for at least 30 minutes before opening.