How to speed up Force Carbonation with Carbonating Lid/Stone

[ckinkade]

I am making soda and force carbonating in a corny keg with a carbonating lid/stone from morebeer.com. While it is working fine, it is taking way longer than I expected -- 4 to 5 days @ 20psi to get to proper carbonation levels.

Any ideas that would help me speed up the process? Should I carnk up the pressure more? Or bleed pressure off and incrementally increase a few psi per hour up to a set PSI?

Any help/ideas are greatly appreciated!!

[DV8Pilot]

Put an adjustable prv on the gas in side of your corny (assuming you're using a carb-stone lid), and adjust it so it just barely starts to flow at a pound or two above your target PSI. Set your CO2 regulator 10 PSI higher than your target, and throttle your CO2 flow so there is barely a perceptible flow from the stone (listen through the side of the corny) and check your carb levels after six hours (the time is going to have to some with experience). The idea is that you'll have continuous flow = more CO2 surface area in contact with your soda, without exceeding your total volumes of CO2.

[pclemon]

You don't say what temp the keg is at. As you probably already know a cold liquid will absorb gas easier at a colder temp so that might help you out (get the keg colder).

When trying to quickly carb a keg some people will turn up the gas high (30+PSI) and rock the keg back and forth in an effort to get the liquid to absorb the gas faster. Realizing you're trying to do a soda with a higher carb level you could try bumping that up a little to 35 PSI.

[ckinkade]

Thanks so much for the suggestions -- will try higher PSI for now and get an order in for an adjustable PRV!!

[gfoster]

In addition, I've found that carbonating the water prior to adding the sugar and extract makes it a much faster task. I generally carbonate about 3 gallons of water first, then I add in the ingredients afterwards. Much faster than trying to force carb a heavy sugary soda after it's already mixed up.

-- Gary F.

[ckinkade]

Thanks again for all the suggestions. I am finding the use of the PRV technique is speeding up things considerably. It does use more Co2 but is much faster.

The next step for me is to figure out how to use one PRV valve with 2 Corny kegs. I've tried hooking up two together with Co2 to the carb stone input of Keg #1 (using carbonating keg lids) and then patching Gas IN on Keg #1 to the carb stone input of Keg #2 and then hook the PRV to Gas IN of Keg #2. The problem is liquid flows through my patch from Keg #1 to Keg #2. Has anyone tried something similar? Do I need a check valve to patch them together? Any advice is much appreciated!!