Keg Couplers

[Edit 2006-01-30: Added a couple of pictures.]

Normally, this would be Line Cleaning Day, but I'm going to be doing some maintenance on the draft lines this week. To that end, I made a quick trip to Ace Hardware to order 300 feet of tubing that I'll use to replace the old CO₂ and beer jumpers from the kegs to the wall brackets. That will happen on Friday, so I'll clean the lines at the same time.

I unloaded the kegs from Saturday's festival and carried them into the basement, where I would spend most of my day. Judah from Nebraskaland Distributing in Grand Island made his regular Monday morning keg pickup around 10:00. (Five 1/6-barrels of Root Beer and a half-barrel of Tin Lizzie Hefeweizen.)

Today's big project is to disassemble, clean, and rebuild the twelve keg couplers in the cellar. Tedious, sticky work, but it's probably the first time they've been properly cleaned in ten years, plus most of the O-rings needed replacing. I didn't expect the job to take four and a half hours. I'm going to add "keg coupler cleaning" to my regular line cleaning routine from now on.

A keg coupler, as if you didn't know

A very dirty coupler probe

All the parts

The batch of All-American Gold that I brewed on Friday took off like a volcano, and blew foam and yeast all over the fermenter room floor, so that all got hosed down after lunch. The gravity has dropped from 11.0°P to 3.5°P — corresponding to about 4.1% abv — and it's still going strong. I may end up diluting it a wee bit when I filter it. Or maybe not.

Tomorrow, I'll start replacing the 300+ tri-clamp gaskets. That should keep me busy for a couple of days, at least.