Wednesday, April 6, 2011

My Kegging Adventure - Part 1

I have been putting a Kegging system together for the past few weeks.  I finally have been able to get all the necessary parts to put my first home brew into this new setup.  I am using a 5 gallon soda keg.  The keg is of the Pepsi, or ball lock disconnects variation.  I have a not so shiny CO2 tank that was used for welding in the past.  I think it holds 50 or 75lbs of liquid CO2.  It's a beast. Special thanks to my brother-in-law for lugging it up to me, and to my father-in-law for letting me use it.  It contains easily enough CO2 to get me through this decade.  I am using an old GE TBX18BLB refrigerator.  I only have one keg at the moment, so all I have done is pull out the shelving and simply placed the keg on the base of the refrigerator.  The bottom is rather grooved, so if I want to get more than 3 kegs in, I will probably need to build some kind of base to help create a flat surface a the base of the fridge.  During this expedition, I also needed to put my CO2 tank, due to its size, outside of the fridge.  This was accomplished by using a 5ft CO2 line.  (It's just ordinary thick walled beverage line.  I also had to run to home depot and pick up a new 3/4" hole saw to place a port on the side of the fridge that the line could go through.  I didn't have any idea where the coils or any lines may be in the sides, so I had to look them up on the net.  Luckily, my model of fridge, from 1990, did have diagrams available on the Sears Parts Direct site.  I bought the kegging system as a kit from Adventures in Homebrewing (www.homebrewing.org).  It came with some pre-cut bev line, and a picnic tap as well.  I am hoping to change out the picnic tap for a perlick front sealing faucet in the coming weeks.  However, for now, my first batch of Dunkelweizen is sitting in the keg, and the pressure is sitting at about 12 PSI.  Hopefully in the next couple of days, it will be good and carbonated up, and ready for a drink.

Cheers!

1 comment:

Eric said...

Its been a few months since you posted this. So how did the beer turn out? Did you get the carbonation right for what you were doing?