Beer Forum

dmtaylor wrote:You guys are going to make me cry!

Taste my beers, though, and your fears of my sanitation practices will be squelched.

OK, send some to my attention. Also include some New Glarus as payment for my tasting services !!

Nothing stretches a pint of beer like a Critter Canteen. The guinee pig of serving vessels. Just sayin'.

Awesome, thanks for the links! And thanks to the others who transformed this from a "how to mini-keg beer" thread to a "how to make me nearly shit my pants laughing" thread!
I need to get myself a CO2 tank and some regulators. For now, I'm using one of the handheld dispensers as well. I imagine that setting up for a real charging tank wouldn't be too hard to figure out.
Once my Pale Ale is done in the secondary, I just may have to give this idea a whirl. Thanks again DMtaylor!
DS

FWIW -- I recently polished off my first mini-keg of homebrew -- so, what's a guy to do then? Well, not seeing any huge benefit in rigorous cleaning and sanitizing the whole keg since there just was beer in it, and I'm just adding beer right back in again, I simply rinsed out the keg good a few times, primed with a tablespoon of sugar, and added more homebrew. The same yeast was used for both batches, so I don't really care about funky yeast flavors developing. The whole rinsing and refilling process took 15 minutes flat. Well, maybe 20 minutes, absolute maximum. It's as if I was almost able to do it during a fricking commercial while watching TV, it was so quick. Amazing. I am really loving this! I suppose at some point I'll need to do some heavy-duty cleaning inside the keg, but in the meantime....... Do you think there is any downside to just rinsing and adding more beer right away, if I'm adding a substantially similar batch back in again? There was live yeast in the keg before, and the same yeast has been added in again, and I did rinse out the vast majority of residual yeast from the previous batch. I'm thinking I might be onto something.... but gosh, what a time-saver! I could have spend an hour bottling, but I cut that time probably by 75% or so! We'll taste it in 5 days or so to see how it's doing. My guess is, it will be awesome. What's your guess?

Awesome work dmtaylor! Thanks for the info, I might just need to give this a try.

San_Diego_Matt wrote:There's got to be a way to get a regular CO2 tank to push through a presta valve. I know there are lots of DIY's out there for making your own carbonator cap and they use a presta valve pressed through the cap of a standard 2 liter soda bottle.

I would assume the guys that make their own carbonator caps to save $10 don't then go out and drop coin on a CO2 charger and the disposable CO2 cartridges. That seems a bit contradictory.

I've got the exact same CO2 dispenser dmtaylor uses. This puppy has a flare fitting on it just like the ones on the quick disconnects/CO2+beverage lines for your corny keg. My guess would be that all you gotta do is screw it on.

Great piece, but I too couldn't get over the empty cat food cans and dirty dishes.

Everyone's a critic

Hello

And thanks for the setup of the mini keg but i have a few questions for ya.
Can you over pressureise the keg with the hand held co2 charger?
Do you use a full cartiage in 1 go?
Do you wait for your beer to condition first for the 10 days then fill with co2 or do you prime then fill the beer then co2 then fridge?
Thanks

Rgs. mrtickel

I haven't overpressurized it yet. When it needs a charge, which is after every couple of pints, I only add about a half-second's worth of CO2 at one time, and this has been doing the trick of keeping the beer carbonated while also being forceful enough to push the beer out for another couple pints.

It takes about 2 or 3 of the little 12 or 16 gram CO2 cartridges to push out a full 5-liter keg of homebrew. At less than a buck a pop, it's not a huge expense, but worth a small amount of consideration.

I prime with 1 tablespoon white sugar for roughly 10 days, then refrigerate. The first pint or two won't need any additional CO2 and will come out with their natural carbonation. After that, you need to add the half-second squirts of CO2 to keep the pressure on for another couple pints.