I am very happy with the result of the American stout. It goes perfect with the cool fall days. I am running it on nitrogen and finally nailed the carbonation to get good cascading pours and nice head. I hooked the keg up to one of the normal CO2 lines running at 11psi in my 36 degree keezer. Each day would hook it to the beer gas at 35psi and do a test pour. After four days I was happy with the result and left it on the beer gas.
I thought it was time for an overhaul on the keezer. Fresh beer lines and rebuilt taps. The compressor decided to give way so it became a new build. I used some of the left over shiplap for the collar to match the rest of the brewery. The dimensions of the new freezer actually work out a little better even though its the same 8.8 cu ft as the old. It is just deep enough to hold two ball locks front to back.
I am sticking with the bev-seal ultra lines even though they are a pain to deal with. They are stiff and you need long lengths (~20ft) to get the resistance you need for pours that are not foamy. I did stretch the lines over barb fittings last time. This time I am going to swap for John Guest/push fittings. I purchased fittings for my MFL ball lock couplers and tap shanks. Finally I have not had much in the way of leaking issues on my Perlicks but i figure it would be good to replace the seals. I picked up both 70 duro FDA buna and 75 duro Vitron FMK FDA orings (014 & 204 size). I am going to try the Vitron on two and buna on the other two. I will let you know if I see a difference.
Several updates today. The whirlpool IPA is ontap and I am very happy with the result. It has that juicy hop character while not being very bitter.
I also picked up my share of the bourbon barrel stout and it is awesome. Far better than I was even expecting. It has a nice nose on it but the flavor is not overpowering and complements the beer very well. Now I need to determine what I am going to do with it. I think I will bottle one keg and serve the other on nitro.
That brings me to my nitro upgrade. In a prior post I discussed a faux nitro setup using CO2. This works but I found it was very easy to forget to bleed the pressure back down to the correct level each night. This resulted in over carbonation several times. Rather they attempt to fix the user… I purchased a 20 cu-ft nitro tank and regulator. It seems there is a lot of confusion around what pressure to run beer gas at so I will write a follow up post discussing that.
I stared a post called new projects in June 2015, all it had was three additions I wanted to make to the brewery. I promptly forgot about it until today while looking through draft posts. Funny enough the three items are three of my more resent adds to the brewery.
I do heat my new brewing space but unless I am working in the space it is only in the 40s or 50s mid-winter. This means I need to heat my fermentation chamber. I am using the same FermWrap I use in the Keezer. This will also be useful for trying the new Norwegian Kveik yeast strains. These like to ferment hot and are very interesting and very different then the yeast I am used to. Check out Larsblog for info.
I finally splurged for a Blickman beer gun. I normally gravitate to DIY options and there are certainly lots of options to build a home made beer gun or counter pressure filler. In this case Blickman’s solution is very slick and what I can build with generic parts would not be as nice by a wide margin. For the price and savings of mine time researching/building/troubleshooting etc its a bargain.
The last item is focused on limiting oxygen exposure during transferring to kegs. This is detailed in a separate post.
I had to pull my gas lines out to find a leak. Funny enough the leak was actually in the connection of one of the factory attached gauges not one of the many added connections. The gauge must have been bumped or twisted while changing kegs recently since it had not leaked previously. It was a quick fix and gave me a chance to photograph the whole gas line setup. See more details on the keezer pages.
Update:
I have switched to a actual beer gas setup. I forgot a few times to set the gas back to low pressure after finishing serving. It would work but user error (me) was the issue.