Best practice to split a batch between keg and bottles

The best way is to put it all in the keg and bottle from there . . . you'll need a bottling gun. If you're new to the gun there's a little bit of a learning curve and it would probably be easier (not better) to use a bottling bucket.

 

I use a Blichmann Beer Gun to bottle straight from keg. Its pretty straight forward but will require an extra investment of around $100. Its worth it if you plan on bottling frequently out of your kegs. If this is just a one off for you just go old school and rack off a gallon from your fermenter
before keging and use a bottling bucket and priming sugar.

 

I would say go out and buy some carbonating drops, and rack your beer into a bottling bucket. put the suggested number of drops in each bottle, then bottle the beers normally. Once that is done, fill the keg.

 

If it's already in the keg then a bottling gun is your best bet or just giving them a growler of your beer. Otherwise bottle some of the beer as you move it into the keg.

Many ways to carbonate but most of them result in the in the same beer. Helps to know ahead of time how your beer will be carbonated

 

I have done things a couple ways. One is the bottle gun approach. Keg the beer, force carb as you normally do, and use the bottling gun to transfer carbonate beer to bottles. The second way is to have a bottling bucket at the ready while transferring beer to the keg. Estimate in advance what volume you want to keg vs bottle. Monitor the volume remain in your fermenter as you transfer to keg, and divert flow to bottling bucket when you reach desired keg volume. If you are showcasing hoppy beers, I think the bottle gun approach is better - it allows you to keg hop and also lets you drink carbonated beer shortly after bottling as opposed to relying on a 3 week window for priming to occur during which some of the hops will oxidize. At least that is my experience.

I will be using the priming approach in an Orval inspired beer I am planning, where I want to add some Brett to half the batch. Don’t want Brett in my keg lines and don’t want to dose Brett to individual bottles, so will keg the non-bretted portion and move the rest to bottle bucket with Brett added.