To Keg or not to Keg

Back in June my lovely wife bought me a Cornelius Keg for my birthday, which I had told her I wanted. These are 5 gallon capacity kegs that are generally used in restaurants to dispense soda, but you can usually buy them pretty cheap (around $40-$50 used) from various websites. The biggest difference between Cornelius (Corny) Kegs (left picture) and your "standard" Sanke Keg (right picture) is that you can actually pop the lid off the Corny Keg and fill it up with whatever you want. Obviously, my plan was to fill er up with my tasty homebrews, thus eliminating the need for the bottles.

So my birthday came and I opened up my awesome new keg and I rushed downstairs to my He-Den to look at the keg and kegerator all together...and I realized the connections didn't match up. That was some poor planning on my part. So I googled and searched and communicated with the fine folks at Midwest Supplies and I found this little kit:

This is about $30 at Adventures in Homebrewing and the shipping was very fast. So these random parts showed up at my house and I had no idea what to do with them. I received the following instructions with the set, which left me kind of baffled as I am not the most mechanically skilled guy around:

I put the project on hold for a while for a few reasons-

1) I was scared of my lack of skills
2) I hadn't cleaned my keg beer lines in forever, so I wanted to take care of that first. But a beer line cleaning kit was roughly $40, and I thought beer kits and actual beer was a better way to spend my money
3) My next brew was set to be my Pumpkinface and I didn't want to screw anything up in the kegging process (forced carbonation?!?!?! what?!?!?!)

So fast forward to this past Friday. I searched how to make a homemade beer line cleaner and I saw a method using a $6 garden hand pump plus the  proper fittings and I decided that was the route I was going to take. So I went to KMart, bought the hand pump and returned home. I opened it up, saw it was used, and decided I wasn't going to use that in my kegerator.

While driving to the store to return the pump, I had an epiphany. The best, easiest, and most logical way to clean my beer lines is to install the conversion kit, fill my new keg with sanitizing solution, then run the solution through the lines. So now the only thing holding me back was my inability to grasp the concept of what I was doing with the conversion kit. Then I found this website Keg Conversion Kit, which breaks it down so simply, even a dolt like myself could understand it.

I had some free time last night so I decided to turn on Gremlins and have a go at the kit. It took about 10 minutes and the hardest part was installing the barbed fitting into the beer line. I then added a few gallons of water to my keg, hooked it, turned the gas on, and let it run for a few minutes to make sure there was no leakage.

Currently fermenting is my Imperial Babyface Milk Stout, so unfortunately I won't be able to keg that because I don't have the proper Stout tap. I think I'm going to brew a kit soon, maybe a Christmas beer, that's relatively quick and easy-- something that's one stage fermentation and doesn't need to age.

Now the only question is how am I supposed to sit through work when all I wanna do is play with my "new" kegerator??

Publish Post