[BobE]

Just out of interest, why will the lager ferment better in a small plastic bottle but doesn't do so in a keg made out of plastic? I think what I'm asking is actually, is it ok to use plastic bottles, rather than glass... won't they explode?

I've had my first brew in a keg now for a week - is there anything I can do - can I put it in bottles now, or is it too late. If I put it in bottles, do I need to use priming sugar?

Thanks again for your help

C

A large 5 gall plastic barrel will only get to 10 PSI pressure.  This is fine for beers.  Lagers require 20 psi to get the fiz inside them, (absorbed CO2).  Glass will always do this better, but a small plastic bottle has less give than the barrel and will do a reasonable job.
... 
Your lager in the barrel will be fine.  I assume you used 100grams of suger when you moved it.
So....
If you did put 100 grams of sugar in the barrel, skip the next line.
If you did not put 100 grams of sugar into the barrel then add 100 grams of sugar to the barrel and stir it.
Move the brew to bottles, glass is best of course.  Lager does need a higher conditioning pressure than beer.
A week in the warm (dark).
A week in cool (dark).
Put three bottles into the fridge.  Wait a few more days.
Taste test.

[CaesarM]

Thanks Bob. My apologies I didn't thank you at the time... I was busy doing just as you'd said.

Results were good to start, I 'rinsed and repeated' and have been tinkering and learning, but feel like I've gone right back to square one. I'm now brewing Coopers lager in kit form, and either adding the priming sugar to my bottling vat before bottling, or adding straight to the bottles I'm now using (I change it because of the following...) I've then put the bottles under the stairs where the boiler is, (in this colder time of the year, I thought that was the right thing to do) for a week or even 2 (due to the failures I've had), and then into the garage for a week even 2. Then into a beer fridge in the garage.

Beer tastes right, but there's very little carbonation. I'm using plastic bottles still (bought the water ones, but then replaced them with ones from a home-brew site) mainly new, so I know the seals are still fair, and I'm seeing the white traces that would indicate to this newbie that something has happened in the bottles. I get good pressure in the bottles between warm and cool... they are hard before I move them to the garage, but then when I come to move them to the fridge, they're flat.

I'm at a complete loss. I'm wondering whether its the weather, and/ or the fact I've only been doing this 5 months so I don't have the experience to do different things in Winter or not... I've even thought it might be that I've switched the type of sugar from Tate and Lyle to some slightly cheaper Aldi equivalent but then I switched back and had no success.

Any help that anyone can offer would be gratefully appreciated as I've checked many forums and can't find the same problems exactly.

Thanks in advance.

C