Bottling from secondary (keg). Wait two weeks and prime or now?

I'm brewing my 1st kit which my gf got from a local hardware store (ironically there's a home brew store not 5 mins away sigh) but wasn't a cheap one.

http://www.wilko.com/cider+beer-brewing/wilko-golden-ale-kit-40pt/invt/0318381

Just need a bit of advise as there is a mountain of information out there and it's making my head spin.

WHAT IVE DONE

It's golden ale, 23 liters (5 gallons) came with two large tins with syrupy like mix in.

Iv'e added the yeast and left it at 20 degrees (68f) and it stopped fermenting after only 3 days, which i thought was odd. tested it with hydrometer and got a reading far short of what was required (22ish not close to 10) the So i added a packet of amylase enzyme to get it going again.

1 week later the fermenting has stopped, tested and carefully transferred to secondary.

After only 24 hrs i pulled some into a glass and it was carbonated with as expected a bitter yeasty taste as it still needs to mature.

WHAT THE QUESTIONS ARE

1) why after such a short time is the beer carbonated with no fermenting when it was flat before transfer to secondary? There are no visual signs of fermenting going on. Might my keg explode? it's good for 15 psi.

2) should i leave it 2 weeks (as suggested by some members and mico brewers) in the keg and then add my 5 ounces of primer and bottle or should i prime and bottle now?

Hope that is clear, thank you.

Topic help first-time-brewer bottle-conditioning secondary-fermentation fermentation homebrew

Category Mac

1
answered at

My bet is that after only 3 days, it wasn't really finished. In combination with the addition of amylase enzyme, you're simply seeing more fermentation activity. Fermentation does not always have an obvious visual component; gravity readings over time are the only solid way of knowing.

My corny kegs are marked as "good" up to 150psi. 15 psi is extremely low for a keg intended for beer; I'll regularly see keg pressures in the 20-30psi range during force carbonation. Do you have any info/link to the keg you have?

If there is still fermentation going on, then you should wait for it to complete. 2 weeks is totally a reasonable amount of time. You should vent the pressure in the keg during this process. You should treat the keg more as fermentation vessel, not as a sealed keg, right now. This will prevent more than the usual amount of fermentation-produced CO₂ from being dissolved in the beer, throwing off the priming sugar addition.

Then, prime and bottle.

Of course, some questions come up: if you have a keg why are you bottling? And if you have a CO₂ tank for the keg, why are you using priming sugar? (Note: I've done both of these things, so I know there are reasons why you would do so, but I'm curious to hear your reasons.)

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