Beer Forum

I manage a local beer store and we offer growlers of craft beers to customers. We are having major waste issues and was wondering if anybody knew the secret to pouring growlers the correct way. I have tried straight from the tap, also using a hose to the bottom of the growler, and even 4 inch hoses to run down the side of the growler, all with no luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I've noted that brew pubs that do this sucessfully carbonate their beer to very low levels and serve it under correspondingly low pressure. You don't get much head on a pour into a glass and you don't get much foam when they fill a growler. Another thing that helps is to have the growler cold and to fill it through a long, small bore hose so that the beer transitions from keg pressure to atmospheric pressure slowly.

When I fill growlers at home, I slightly over carb my beer, chill near 32F and finally push my beer at 3-4 psi.. This works even better if the growler is chilled as well!


Josh

I would post this on the probrewer.com forum if you don't get an answer here.

But make sure your draft system is set up right first, plenty of places pour from the tap with a hose at normal pressure with no problems.

I have found that reducing the CO2 helps but isn't that bad because the beer will go flat faster. I had my beer distributer tell me that the pressure should always be around 10 to keep it carbonated.

The amoun of gas dissolved increases with increased pressure and decreased temperature (and the combination depends on the brewer's desired volumes i.e. it isn't the same for all beers. If you normally serve at 8 - 10 and 40 °F you can get more gas into the beer by lowering the temperature to 35 and increasing the pressure to say 15. Now if you bleed off most of that pressure slowly (over a period of a couple of minutes) the CO2 won't leave the beer suddenly and using the remaining low pressure to push the beer will push it slowly meaning less breakout. Filling into a chilled growler completes the picture.

This is, of course, inconvenient for a working bar where you want to be able to pop a filling hose over the faucet mouth and open the valve. A draft system balanced to dispense low carbonation beers at low pressure is the most likely to give success.

My local small brewery does this without letting pressure off the kegs. They attach what looks like a racking cane via a small piece of silicone tube that slips over the faucet. More importantly, they use a European faucet with a lever that looks like it gently controls the flow and reduces the CO2 breakout. I have growlers filled there all the time and am also unable to repeat their results at home unless I let the pressure off my keg to 3-5 PSI, which I do not normally do unless I am bottling with my Blichmann Beer gun.