Corny Newbie - Beer Line Advice

Morning Team

I have had a couple of kegs glinting temptingly in the corner of the brew shed for a couple of months now and having finally sourced some CO2 and with a suitable brew nearing completion now is the time to get one of them into action.

Problem is despite reading numerous posts I am going round the twist trying to work out what line to use. I originally purchased 5m of clear plastic 3/8 " to serve as both gas and beer line.

Problem is whenever I attempt to use any of the calculators it comes out with crazy lengths for the beer line. Are you all just using 3/16th line or is the issue of foaming overstated?

Also I purchased a really cheap plasticky picnic tap - will that suffice to dispense beer?

Cheers in advance

Horners

Pinic tap should be fine. depends on a few things though.
what level are you carbonating to and what temperature will the keg be stored at?

Braufather said:

Pinic tap should be fine. depends on a few things though.
what level are you carbonating to and what temperature will the keg be stored at?

Click to expand...

Most of my beers will be English style bitters My plan would generally be to chill the keg to say 10 degrees and then leave out of fridgefor the couple of hours or so at a time I will be dispensing. I like it the fizzier end of the spectrum so say 2.2 volumes?

you should be fine then. ive got a picnic tap but mostly use a tap direct on the corny, and even that works -you have to be a bit patient and careful but that works fine. and that's mainly american style ales at 2.6, so you should have no issues with a picnic tap. if its going to sit out for a while you might want to think about an insulating jacket, but i wouldn't even worry about that for a up to 6 hours.

if you need to move it far from fridge it will need time to settle.

Braufather said:

you should be fine then. ive got a picnic tap but mostly use a tap direct on the corny, and even that works -you have to be a bit patient and careful but that works fine. and that's mainly american style ales at 2.6, so you should have no issues with a picnic tap. if its going to sit out for a while you might want to think about an insulating jacket, but i wouldn't even worry about that for a up to 6 hours.

if you need to move it far from fridge it will need time to settle.

Click to expand...

Thanks mate really helpful. Whilst we are on the subject i was not intending to keep the tank hooked up in between times - any potential pitfalls with this? I am assuming the beer will retain its fizz as its all under pressure?

Horners said:

Most of my beers will be English style bitters My plan would generally be to chill the keg to say 10 degrees and then leave out of fridgefor the couple of hours or so at a time I will be dispensing. I like it the fizzier end of the spectrum so say 2.2 volumes?

Click to expand...

This is what I do with my lagers: in the fridge between servings and then hooked up for a couple of hours of use. It works fine as a strategy. As for the lines themselves I use 3/8" everywhere and a flow-control tap to serve. My beer-line is 5' long and rises more or less vertically 5' to where the tap is mounted.

I highly recommend the flow-control taps on ebay. I basically flip the tap on when I want to pour then the use the flow control lever to fill it gently to begin with then a little more at the end to provide the size of head I want. On full speed it would be just foam. On about half speed it fills with no head at all. Adjust to taste, as they say. I'm a keg newbie as well so I can't comment on how what I do compares to the other methods of dispensing.

foxbat said:

This is what I do with my lagers: in the fridge between servings and then hooked up for a couple of hours of use. It works fine as a strategy. As for the lines themselves I use 3/8" everywhere and a flow-control tap to serve. My beer-line is 5' long and rises more or less vertically 5' to where the tap is mounted.

I highly recommend the flow-control taps on ebay. I basically flip the tap on when I want to pour then the use the flow control lever to fill it gently to begin with then a little more at the end to provide the size of head I want. On full speed it would be just foam. On about half speed it fills with no head at all. Adjust to taste, as they say. I'm a keg newbie as well so I can't comment on how what I do compares to the other methods of dispensing.

Click to expand...

thanks for the tip

Horners said:

Thanks mate really helpful. Whilst we are on the subject i was not intending to keep the tank hooked up in between times - any potential pitfalls with this? I am assuming the beer will retain its fizz as its all under pressure?

Click to expand...

That was my thinking too initially but once you start dispensing they will loose pressure after a while. i think ideally you want to keep them at a pressure of about 5 bar for serving, although i have found they will serve four or five pints not connected.

i also use 16g capsules and a mini charger for a party where i want a couple on the go at once and don't want to lug the gas cannister about.
i am new to this myself but have done about 10 cornies now - I was asking all these questions myself 6 months ago!

Between times you should be fine for storage, maybe give it a blast every now and then, thats what i do anyway.

@foxbat would you mind putting up a link?

Horners said:

@foxbat would you mind putting up a link?

Click to expand...

For the tap? Here's the one I bought:

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https://www.ebay.co.uk/ulk/itm/122474675496

There are lots of them on Ebay. The cheapest come from China and save about a fiver off the uk sellers but take a few weeks to arrive.

Great @foxbat and would i need anything other than a jubilee clip to hook it up to the 3/8 line?

Where is the tap fixed?

Horners said:

Great @foxbat and would i need anything other than a jubilee clip to hook it up to the 3/8 line?

Click to expand...

I don't even bother with a clip. The 3/8 line presses tight on to the supplied barb and doesn't leak with me serving at 15psi (the same as I carbonated at).

foxbat said:

I don't even bother with a clip. The 3/8 line presses tight on to the supplied barb and doesn't leak with me serving at 15psi (the same as I carbonated at).

Click to expand...

Well im having having a lot of fun mucking around with it - glad its only water.

I just read this thread and I thought that I would reply to highlight the problems I had and how I finally solved them.

I built a kegerator for 3 nice new Cornies and being an engineer I read up on line calculations, found what looked like a good calculator and set it all up. I too was using 3/8 tube and the calcs told me for dispensing at about 10 deg C I needed around (from memory) 6m of coiled pipe in each outlet. The CO2 pressure was around 10 psi if I recall correctly. To cut a long story short ... the result was nothing but foam. I then moved over to short legs of pipe with flow control valves. Result less foam but very slow dispensing and hopeless for parties. After lots of thought, I concluded it must be gas pressure. Everything else is well controlled and the laws of physics at this scale are very repeatable, so the obvious and relatively untrustworthy variable was gas pressure. I searched for a better regulator but couldn't easily find one for low pressure operation at a sensible price, so decided to build an electronic one. I used an Arduino controller, a welding gas solenoid plus an electronic gas pressure sensor. All this was quite a bit cheaper than buying a pro regulator and a lot more fun to build and play with. The electronic regulator acts as a unidirectional bang-bang pressure sub-regulator. So it takes in CO2 at above the required pressure and gives repeated short squirts of gas until the right pressure is hit. I added a 15psi gauge to the output to give an accurate indication of pressure ... a more sensible range than the ridiculous 4 bar range of my primary regulator. Once it was all working the pressure control was excellent and I can set target pressures in my ~8psi target area quite precisely. The net result was a fast pour of lightly carbonated beer with very little foam, just what was wanted.

Conclusion: Annoyingly the regulator I was sold for around £50 turned out to be a rubbish welding CO2 regulator and the output pressure was so inaccurate to make the gauge totally misleading and useless. Probably 1 bar on the scale is perhaps actually 2 bar. Consequently the beer was being massively over-carbonated and being dispensed as foam. Of course once the foam subsided the remaining beer had little CO2 left, so obvious in hindsight but not clear at the time.

I think the moral of the tale is be careful with pressures and buy a professional quality regulator. Then the line length is much less of an issue than it would appear from the literature, or at least the calculations will work.

Hope of some interest to anyone else struggling with such matters!