If you have been producing your own beer for a while, you have in all probability accumulated a fairly hefty assortment of bottles to contain all that home brewed beer. Bottles are practical as they are so portable, and they also contain what most of us think of as a single serving of beer. However you’ve probably also been thinking about just how cool it could be to pour your very own home brewed ale and lager on draft. You comprehend, undoubtedly, that standard commercial kegs may not be easy to open without having specially designed gear, so filling them with home brew would in all probability be a challenge. Is there another way to go?
Thankfully, you will discover several. A widely used alternative is called a “Party Pig”. It is essentially a large bottle that is placed on its side inside the ‘fridge, and features a faucet in the front that you can serve a mug of beer from. This can be a pretty simple sort of draft system, and is often a great option for home brewers who do not have the space for a keg as well as a CO2 bottle in their ‘fridge. It’s relatively small, and additionally delivers the benefit of being much more transportable than full-size kegs.
Yet another alternative, the one that this document is concerned with, is termed a Cornelius, aka “Corny”, keg. Those who worked at a restaurant during the eighties or early 90s, you might be aware of these — they are the containers that soda syrup used to come in. The “bag in box” containers have largely replaced those tanks now, which has been good for us home brewers, considering the fact that those discarded containers, when cleaned up, are fantastic kegs for us to use.
Cornelius kegs have the benefit of being simple to open for cleaning and filling, and they hold five and a half gallons of beer — ideal to hold a 5- to 5.5-gallon batch of beer. They may be significantly less difficult to carry about than commercial kegs, though obviously they are not really as portable as a Party Pig or bottle. In case you have a spare ‘fridge that you can convert to a “kegerator”, you’ll be able to fit two or three Cornelius kegs as well as a little CO2 tank in order that you can have diverse varieties of home brewed beer on draft. If you’re driven, you can drill holes through the door of the ‘fridge to install faucets, or you could just leave the door alone and use the typical plastic “picnic faucets” that you might remember from the keggers of your youth.
There are 2 key types of Cornelius kegs which you’ll come across. Kegs that were formerly utilized by Coke will be identified as “pin lock” type kegs, and they are somewhat more uncommon, but far from hard to find. Home brewers generally prefer the kegs coming from Pepsi, called “ball-lock” type kegs. I am not sure the reason for that choice; it may well have more to do with availability than anything. I’ve used both types, and in fact liked the pin-lock kegs somewhat better, even though my existing setup is all ball-lock. Even though there is nothing bad with utilizing the two varieties, you will possibly think it is less difficult to deal with having just 1 type, so that you do not have to figure out which parts belong with which kegs; parts from one style will not be interchangeable with elements from the other.
Cornelius kegs are a fantastic means for home brewers to keg their very own home brewed beer. As soon as you get started, you are likely to question exactly why you didn’t do it sooner. You are able to nonetheless bottle some occasionally if you need to bring them to the homes of friends or submit them to competitions, but apart from that, there’s nothing quite like being able to serve yourself a frosty mug of your very own home brew, from your own draft system.
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