Boonie wrote:Thanks TL......Ebay has lots of those, so I am on the right track with that one now that you have cleared that up.
Now, what else do I need??
Pictures of anything else I need with a list of parts....? I obviously need gas with Gas lines which I can hire.
Pressure gauges?...Tips?
And one more, how do I get the beer in the keg? I assume I pull the handle to open valve to fill the keg.
Boonie,
Once you've got the keg and coupler you need a gas bottle filled with CO2 so you can carbonate the keg and provide pouring pressure once the beer's gassed up. Now to move the CO2, you need a CO2 regulator that steps down the pressure in the gas bottle to safer levels. You'll operate between zero and around 30psi and the pressure in the gas bottle can get over 900psi which is a bit too much for your keg to handle!
You can get a single or dual guage regulator - dual guage units are nice but don't help all that much. One guage measures the pressure being delivered out of the keg and the other guage measures the pressure in the head space of the CO2 bottle. It's meant to show when the CO2 pressure drops so you can get ready to refill or replace it, but to be honest, you don't get much warning and the gas quickly runs out when you've got no liquid CO2 left in the gas bottle to replenish the headspace pressure in the gas bottle as you draw it out. Here's a pic of my dual guage gas regulator showing the low and high side pressure guages. The knob in the centre adjusts gas out pressure of the reg and the gas comes out of the barb on the LHS of the reg:
So let's move on - you need some decent gas line to move the gas from the barb on the gas regulator that's mounted on top of the CO2 bottle. Don't buy cheap crap line from Bunnies - get decent gas line from a HBS that deals with keg setups and lash out and buy an inline check valve to stop any beer running back up the gas line and trashing your expensive gas regulator - which can happen if you have overfilled the keg and it's under pressure. They're an excellent investment...trust me.
Get yourself a bunch of screw driven steel hose clips and secure the hose onto the regulator barb and the gas in barb on the keg coupler. That's basically the gas side done...
Beer out is just as simple - buy a length of Valpar beer line from a keg supplier / HBS (don't use rubbish cheapo plastic line that leaves a delightful garden hose flavour in your beer and makes it hard to balance your beer to gas levels in the beer out line) and at the delivery end you can connect a cobra / picnic tap or a beer tap that's mounted on a font or bartop or on your fridge door - the choice is yours...
A cobra/picnic tap is a good cheap starting tap but it really should only be used as a stopgap until you buy a better quality beer tap. That said, I've used one as an extra pouring solution for my 8 keg setup with not a single problem - as long as you keep it clean...here's a pic of one correctly fitted to a beer line with a small hose clamp I mentioned earlier:
With this basic setup in play, you can get by but a more sophisticated tap is what you'll need, such as a pluto gun which is a handgun that you might have seen at some BBQ's:
Or you might want a more elegant solution, such as a tap mounted on the fridge door onto a shank that has a nipple on the back end that you connect the beer line to inside the fridge. Here's my Ventmatic Ultra Flow tap and shank setup:
One hole in the side of the fridge allows a gas line in and another hole on the door lets me mount the shank and tap assembly. Alternatively, you might want to setup a very sexy chest freezer with temp controller and chilled font on top that houses several taps - very very nice but not cheap...Ross has a brilliant setup that I'm sure he'll happily post some pics of if you ask nicely!
Here's a shot of a two tap font to give you a general idea of what you could mount on a bar or converted chest freezer:
Anyway, that's a rough guide - you need gas in and lines and a beer out line to a delivery tap. Once it's all setup you need to balance the system - so you don't get all foam or flat beer out of the tap. That's another story!! Here's a summary pic of the beer system using a D type coupler, but the principles remain the same:
Cheers,
TL
