A Counter Pressure bottle filler is a great device that is almost a need to have for any serious home brewer. You can make your own too, but it is recommended to just buy one – unless you have a proven design and access to good parts.
You will get clear, sediment free beer :- )
We really like the one valve design with a pressure relief valve on the left side, this allows for pressure to escape as you fill the bottle with beer/co2 – otherwise the beer flow would stop… it also allows for foam to escape once it is towards the top.
Tip: Many people recommend that you cool down the beer before filling as this eliminates foam problems, but we found that if you release all the built-up pressure in the Keg first, before connecting the co2 input for this process, it almost eliminates all the foam issues even when filling warm beer that has not been cooled at all – and you can totally skip this step.
In this video we show how the bigger bottle was filled… this was warm beer from the keg at room temperature.
As you can see from the pictures below, you can fill all kinds of bottle sizes and after a few bottles you will get a hang of it really quickly. We fill our bottles at about 11 psi… with a T splitter from the co2 bottle (meaning) that we split the gas line, and left side goes to feed the Keg and right side goes to feed the counter pressure device.
- Purge all the air from the bottle with co2, squirt some gas as you insert the device into the bottle
- adjust your pressure relief valve
- once bottle is fully under pressure and the oxygen (air) is out
- switch to beer side and let it rip
- some foam is good, because you want to cap-on-foam // so this is a no big deal
Happy capping!
