At the zenith of laziness. Or, simplicity.

And you thought I'd stop there, after doing BIAB, no sparge, no chill. Nope! I do believe now that I've hit the ultimate in AG-brewing, simplified. On top of my usual time-saving BIAB, no sparge, no chill procedure, I've moved on to further streamlining my fermentation and conditioning process - a single-vessel fermentation.


Here's how it works: after the boil, I dump the wort directly into the keg, which serves as the no-chill container. It is sealed as per normal, and 15 PSI of CO2 is pumped in - both to seal the lid, and to account for the vacuum as the wort cools. The keg is then left over night to cool to room temperature, then placed into the fermentation fridge for another night to cool to pitching temperature.

When I'm ready to pitch the yeast, I purge the keg, hook up an oxygen tank to the gas-in post and shake the keg for 45 seconds with pure O2. Yeast is then dumped in, and a blow-off tube is hooked up to the keg's gas-in post. I add a few drops of Fermcap so as to prevent an explosive blow-off.

At the end of fermentation, the blow-off tube is removed and finings are added directly into the keg. The first pint of beer is pulled out using a sanitised cobra tap, and it consists of mainly very clean yeast - this is pumped into a jar and saved for a reuse. I can either carbonate as-is and serve straight from this single keg (which served as a no-chill vessel + fermentation vessel), or transfer to a serving keg.

It all sounds very good on paper, but how was it in practice?

IT WAS PURE, RAPTUROUS BLISS!!!

I tried it with a batch of Munich Helless on my last brewday. First, the boiling-hot wort was siphoned directly into the keg.

In this next photo, you can see the keg sitting in the fermentation fridge, with a blow-off tube attached to it.

At the end of fermentation, I did a pressure transfer cum filtration to a serving keg. CO2 was pumped in through the gas-in post, while beer flowed out through the liquid-out post and through a 3-micron filter, and it then flowed into the receiving keg via the liquid-out post. The blow-off tube assembly you see in the picture above was reused as a pressure relief valve, after being hooked onto the receiving keg's gas-in post. The entire pressure transfer and filtration used CO2 at 2 PSI and took about 30 minutes for the entire keg.

The transfer was stopped when yeast sediment started appearing at the liquid-out post of the fermentation keg. Here's what it looked like inside the original keg, with almost all the yeast and trub left behind.

Of course, the resultant yeast can always be washed and reused, but I had already saved a good amount of healthy yeast from the first tapping. Here's how gorgeous and healthy the yeast looked!

So there you go - my single brewing vessel + single fermentation/serving vessel concept. What I really liked about this process is that it is super easy, sanitary, and the beer has never touched any oxygen from fermentation-to-glass. (Both the receiving keg and the filter were purged with CO2 prior to use, in this case). And in case you're wondering about infection using a keg as a no-chill vessel, the wort in this test case sat there for a full week prior to pitching and it was as good as anything.

I carbed it using 30 PSI for 2 days and turning it down to 12 PSI on the 3rd. On the 4th day, this was what I got: 

Perfectly-carbed, super simple beer. =D