A serious crack at home brewing + a lot of stuff about kegs (page 4)

[Guest]

Scott, FYI, for about the same cost of a Pluto Gun you can get a nice flow control Perlick tap.

[AndyG4]

Apologies to the OP, but this is important and relevant to the tangent that Bill and I ventured on.

 

no worries dude, i'm glad the thread became useful to someone else - the heading has even been suitably amended

[Guest]

I would say that a serious crack at home brewing would be expanding into the use of kegs anyway [rightful]

[AndyG4]

i can't disagree with that Bill!

 

one day...

[*****]

...one day...

 

Will that day be after rinsing, cleaning, santising & capping 535 bottles (my story) or a few thousand [pouty] .

 

So when someone gets more serious about home brewing and moves to kegs should they go pin lock or ball lock or doesn't it matter. Pin locks come from Coke (50mm shorter) and are cheaper and in greater supply, ball locks from Pepsi are popular, more expensive and therefore in shorter supply (obviously at the start there were more Coke post mix kegs). The lack of a manual relief on the Coke Keg and the fact that the PRV is a fuse type are a disadvantage, but what are the chances that the keg pressure will rise to 100 PSI?. What other advantages or disadvantages exist?

[Guest]

You can still relief the pressure with pinlock kegs. Just press the poppet in, no probs. Same as the balllock kegs without the manual PRV.

 

Depending on the footprint of where you are going to store the kegs... pinlocks are fatter therefore taking more room. However, the Balllocks are slightly taller but this can be accommodated for.

Pinlocks are cheaper.

Pin lock parts are not as common as Balllock

Pinlocks require a special tool to remove the posts.

In a crowded kegerator the ball lock quick disconnects can be moved in a circle to get the gas and beer lines sitting right, whereas with the pinlock variety the disconnects sit whatever direction they have ended up pointing at - also with a kegmate style fridge, if you eventually decide on one, you can just fit in 3 ball locks but I'd not be confident of getting 3 pin locks in as they are an inch wider.

Pin lock disconnects can't be put on the wrong posts.

 

[ChrisK]

About 14 months ago I was asking similar questions and thinking about dunking my tow in the kegging space.

 

Now I have this:

 

 

I'm really really keen to go grain, so next on the list is to fit a short shank thermometer to my brew pot, then try the recipies in this thread, then buy a keggle and Install an electric heating element in it.

 

Good times :)