My first batch fermented in a keg finished and I couldn’t be happier with the results! As expected, cold crashing by simply disconnecting the blow-off and putting the keg in my keezer was easy to do and resulted in no potentially oxygen introducing suck back.
After cold crashing was complete I prepared my serving keg by filling a couple of gallons of iodophor sanitizer and then pushing that out with CO2, resulting in a sanitized keg with greatly reduced oxygen therein.
Next, I hooked up my picnic tapper to my fermentation keg in anticipation of blowing off the trub collected there, but there was almost none. Seems like removing 1 inch from the dip tube was just right.
Then reducing the CO2 pressure to about 5 psi I hooked up my transfer line from the beverage out on the fermenter to the beverage out on my serving keg, and using my (newly acquired!) relief valve set at about half that pressure transferred over the beer. It took a few minutes, but required no intervention on my part and, best of all, didn’t introduce any oxygen to the finished beer!
Cleaning the fermenter was a breeze. With the bail removed from the keg I could easily reach in and scrub the krausen ring and then blast out the trub with a hose, maybe five minutes total.
Everything went according to plan, and the only thing I can’t explain is why I didn’t adapt my process sooner. While I’m not going to throw away my glass fermenter just yet, make me an offer and I might just let it go cheap!