Using Corny Keg & Beer Gun as Bottle Bucket

Racking this beer into a keg and then bottle filling is only going to increase oxidation.
Less handled beer is less oxidized beer. You might want to try it with another brew.

Racking on to your priming solution would be the best way to mix the solution into the beer. That would be my method. Purge with CO2. You have it, may as well use it.


Cheers

 

I've done this, and there's a couple of problems:

If you're talking 5'ish gallons you'll have a non-homogenous mix of the sugar/beer unless you stir frequently. With a bucket this is easy and something as simple as a few swipes of a stir spoon or bottling wand. In a keg the only way to stir is to shake it. But...insert problem here...for the beer to flow to the gun you have a head of pressure. Each time you shake you are exposing more of the beer's surface area to CO2 under pressure which can lead to over-carbonating. Essentially this is a quick-carb technique.

In my case I did exactly as described above and the first bottles were 750s which ended up carb'ed okay. The next set were some 500s which over-carb'ed. The last bottling was 350s which were really over-carb'ed. Yep, repeated shaking under pressure added extra CO2 to the last batch which I only figured out because I was doing different size bottles.

Failure to stir may result in sugar settling and leaving the last batch of bottles under-carb'ed. Your basic rock/hard-spot dilemma. I suppose you could vent between shakes but that'll be a PITA. The mechanics of the process did work okay, but I won't be doing this again.

 

I only rack on top of the sugar solution if I've boiled it with an adequate amount of water so that it is a thin solution so it dissipates more easily. My amount of water is determined by how much my beer is short of the recipe amount (and I'm always short by some amount of beer by design).

If the beer doesn't need much catch-up water, I'll boil the sugar in as small an amount as I can and then stir the syrup in when adding it.

Regardless of which way the sugar gets added, I'll still stir the beer 4-5 times during bottling with an easy/smooth bottom-to-top stroke to bring that heavy sugar back to the top.

 

Could you keg condition (naturally) then bottle?

 

I bottle from a keg and it works well. Purge keg, add beer and sugar and bottle with a bottling wand jammed in a picnic tap. I add the priming sugar solution when the keg is about 1/3 full and agitate gently. Have never had carbonation issues except with a couple of old Orval bottles I failed to sanitize sufficiently...