A portable CO2 setup for serving homebrew out of kegs
This year I’m supplying homebrewed beer to two weddings. One was last weekend and it was a big success. I brought 4 kegs of beer and returned with no beer.
Having a keg system is great at home, but more of a pain when serving beer at parties or other events. The CO2 cylinder that I use holds 20 pounds of CO2 and weighs even more and is difficult to travel with.
An alternative is to use the little disposable 12 gram CO2 cartridges. A company makes an adapter that will connect of these to a soda keg (used by many homebrewers), but it takes 3 12g cartridges to dispense a full keg. The cartridges cost about $1.50 each and aren’t reusable and don’t keep a steady pressure on the keg.
Paintball guns use small CO2 cylinders which are refillable, but they don’t use a standard fittings. I’ve asked around for a little while, but none of the homebrew people that I knew had a way to hook them up to a standard regulator. Paintball gun regulators output a much higher pressure than what you need for beer and aren’t very stable.
While flipping through Zymergy I found a little blurb on a company selling beverage regulators for paintball CO2 bottles. They sell entire kits, or just the fitting for the paintball CO2 cylinder. A friend offered to give me some paintball CO2 cylinders and I already had some CO2 regulators, so I just bought the adapter fitting from them. You can do this if your regulator takes 1/4″ NPT left hand thread fittings (most beverage regulators do, most welding ones do not).
Everything arrived and I put it together just before last weekends wedding. You can see the final result in the photo above hanging between the trashcans. We served 4 full 5 gallon kegs and the bottle appears to have plenty of CO2 left. The whole setup (regultor, beer lines, two paintball CO2 cylinders) was small enough to carry in a plastic shopping bag.
This would also work great in an apartment if you wanted to keep beer kegs in your kitchen fridge. The small paintball CO2 cylinder is much smaller than a normal 5# or 10# CO2 cylinder. You can buy kits for refilling them from regular CO2 cylinders with a special kit or get them refilled at a paintball shop. It cost me $4 and about 5 minutes to refill a 16oz cylinder at the local paintball shop.
This would also be a great thing for a homebrew club to own and rent out to it’s members for parties and other events.
I just found your site while researching using paintball CO2 cylinders for dispensing from kegs. You say you got 4 kegs dispensed, did you ever find out what the maximum number of kegs you could dispense from one cylinder was? I”m also wondering if it might be possible to force carbonate a couple of kegs from them too.
I haven”t killed either of my paintball cylinders yet. I expect that they”ll deliver about 10 kegs of beer.
Force carbonating is another issue. It takes a higher volume of CO2 to do that, and I expect that you”d kill a cylinder after doing a keg or two. I find that I get about two years of life out of a 20lb CO2 cylinder (I might make 20 kegs of beer in that time). I probably lose some of that to leakage, purging of fermentation tanks, etc, but that is still 20x larger than the small paintball cylinders. I don”t think that the paintball cylinders would be large enough to be the primary source of CO2 for a homebrewer.