Need Some Help With Keg Setup Please

[JoeG]

Hi all

I've been brewing a good few years, but I'm newcomer to kegs. I gave my first kegged beer a good nudge on the weekend (with some help naturally), but I could not get it to pour right - every glass was froth and hence took ages to fill. From what I've read (here and the destruction manual) everything should have been OK.

The beer was not overly carbonated, in fact a little under carbonated.

I released the head pressure from the keg, before setting the dispensing pressure to 70 KPA.

The beer line (with gun) is a touch over 1.5 m long.

The only thing I noticed was the beer in the beer line looked a bit frothy, with visible gas bubbles? Not sure if this should be the case or not.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

 

[fraser_john]

The Wiki has some help for this

Balancing Draft System

 

[JoeG]

Cheers Fraser_John.

From my reading of the wiki article, the only thing that could be a problem is the length of the beer line. I'll try it longer and see how it works out.

thanks.

 

[Zwickel]

I released the head pressure from the keg, before setting the dispensing pressure to 70 KPA.

that might be the reason, you shouldnt do so.
In fact, that means, the beer has been overcarbonated (more CO2 in the beer than the pressure in the keg allows).
As you know, the solved CO2 in the beer depends on the pressure.
If you lower the pressure at once, the beer cant hold the CO2 anymore, the result youve seen.
Anyway, if youre going to change the pressure in the keg for any reason, the beer takes a long time (a couple of days) to get in equilibrium again.

 

[tangent]

yeah, the beer squirts out and turns to foam, most of the CO2 has come out of solution after the foam subsides and you get flat beer, so automatically think that you need more gas, which is wrong.
Start with ~3metres of beer line (coil it up so it doesn't fill the fridge) it's cheap and you can always trim later. That should give you some resistance and slow the flow down. A slow pour is better than 99% head and 1% flat beer.
One of the best home made miracle boxes I've seen had 10M of beer line for each tap.
Needed more CO2 pressure to push it through and had heaps of fizz with a moderate speed pour.