In my opinion, one of the single biggest upgrades you can make in homebrewing is switching from bottling to kegging. There\u2019s nothing quite like the first time you pour yourself a draft beer at home, and I would never be able to go back to the hassle of using priming sugar and bottle conditioning my homebrew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of that said, I do miss the ability to easily give a few bottles of homebrew to friends or package them for competitions. I\u2019ve tried, and somewhat <\/em>successfully filled bottles or growlers carefully from my taps using some silicone tubing, but between the oxygen exposure and loss of pressure, it\u2019s not a great long-term solution. I\u2019ve played around with a few bottling systems over the years with fairly mixed results. Some of them work well, but I found them all to be a pain to use and never stuck with any. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because of my mixed experience with counter-pressure fillers and beer guns, I was very excited when my new friends at Boel Company<\/a> contacted BrewTogether about the possibility of us trying out their new iTap bottling system<\/a>. Full disclosure, they sent us a free iTap <\/a>unit so that we could do the review, but we\u2019re not getting paid for this and this is an honest review. And the honest review is that this thing is freaking AWESOME. I cannot believe how well it works and how easy it is to use. Not everything we try and review makes the cut for an article, and very few of them end up being something we use regularly, but the iTap has a permanent place on a keezer here at BrewTogether HQ and we\u2019re using it very often already.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n