Once your beer has finished fermenting (typically two weeks after brew day), you’ve got a big decision to make: to keg or to bottle. I will review both methods here with full disclosure that I am strongly in favor of kegging over bottling. Despite a higher cost of entry, kegging offers many advantages over bottling:

• Probably the biggest advantage is that you can eliminate almost all oxygen from the keg. This is vitally important as it will keep off flavors and colors out of your beer.

• When combined with a CO2 tank, your beer will be ready to drink sooner (within a few days as opposed to two weeks) as we can force-carbonate it

• Its easy to correct for over or under-carbonated beers when using a keg and CO2

• There’s only one vessel to fill with beer as opposed to many

• Kegging is faster and less cumbersome than bottling

• Filling and capping bottles can be cumbersome while filling and closing a keg is easy

There are some occasions where I will bottle instead of keg:

• If I want to bring some tasty homebrew over to someone’s house, bottles are way more portable then kegs.

• I don’t always want to tie up a keg for a few weeks when I make a beer that needs to be cold-stored for a while - i.e. a Lager, Pilsner or Kolsch