Archive for the ‘Brewing’ Category.

A portable CO2 setup for serving homebrew out of kegs

July 26, 2006, 3:21 pm

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.

Category: Brewing  |  2 Comments

Too much beer (on hand)…

January 20, 2006, 4:56 am

These days I seem to like brewing beer more than drinking beer. Right now in the basement I have the following on tap:

  • A pale ale (fairly hoppy, actually a blend of three other beers that I made)
  • A really fine Porter
  • A nice Weizen
  • Two kegs of Barleywine (what was I thinking, this is strong stuff and probably will last me two-three years)
  • A keg of Oat Wine (this is a Barleywine that is primarily made with Oats)
  • Some Ginger Mead
  • A way too sweet ale (sort of a clone of Mac and Jacks’ African Amber but it was the first beer on our new system and efficiency was way higher than expected so it is too sweet. Oh, plus, we had less hops than we thought we did).

That is 8 corny kegs. I only own 8 corny kegs (and one or two of these probably really belong to my friend Peter).. Too much shouldn’t be a problem, but I need some empty kegs so I can try making something new (perhaps an Oatmeal Stout with the rest of the malted oats).

Yeah, there are much more reasonable things to complain about like the fact that Bush has 3 years and 1 day left in office, but this is more fun to think about.

I hope everyone is having a great Jan. I’ve been busy at work and haven’t done too much interesting at home so the blog has been taking a break. It should wake up in a month or two once we start on the kitchen remodel and I do some work on one of my woodworking projects and one or two bike projects.

alex

P.S. Here is some math because I am bored. A corny keg is 5 gallons or 640oz. The beer glasses that I use these days are only about 7oz (half a bottle’s worth) or about 90 glasses. If I have ten glasses a week that means a full keg should last about nine weeks. Not all of my kegs are full, but at this rate I might have 8-12 months worth of beer on hand. Overboard? I probably just need to have another party or two.

At the last party the ginger mead was a big hit and it is almost gone, so I need to make more of that too. Easy and good.

Category: Brewing  |  1 Comment