Why Is There No Pressure In My King Keg/Budget Barrel

[Horden Hillbilly]

If yoe are loosing pressure a good way of finding out where it is coming from is to give it a squirt of gas (S30 cylinder, widget, CO2 bulb, etc) then listen for gas escaping around the valve/cap/tap areas as these are the most likely areas of leakage.

EDIT- Silly me! I should have noticed that DAAB had already covered this!

[shaunmarrison]

What is the ambient temperature?
Yeast can start to go dormant occasionaly at temperatures as high as 17 deg c. Bring the keg back to room temperature for a week or two.

Don't you mean as low as 17 Degrees?

[jasonaustin]

No, DaaB is correct.
Yeast goes dormant at a certain (low) temperature - 9C or 12C or 17C, say, depending on the strain. Therefore, some yeast strains may go dormant at a temperature as high as 17C.

[PieOPah]

I have just bought a King Keg. When I was sanitizing it, although I had the lid on tight, some of my solution still managed to leak out. Obviously if water could get out, so could CO2.

I tightened up and quirted gas in - seemed okay.

After priming and racking my beer, I pulled off a pint (a couple of days later). The amount of froth was unbelievable. A couple of weeks later and the beer just pours with the tap fully open. I get a small amount of head. With my budget barrel this means that I am about to run out of gas and need to force carb the rest.

Is this the same with the King Keg? I did give a blast of CO2 and couldn't hear any escape. With this force carb, I did get a frothy pint, but again this has died down.

Maybe because the barrel is bigger, the pressure is completely different. Maybe it has something to do with the sparkler tap?

Do I just have a very slow leak? I guess I will find out better when I can't dispense any more.....

[jasonaustin]

I now use corny kegs, but used King Kegs successfully for about 10 years. Here are a few thoughts based on my experience with them.

1. Unless the pressure in the keg is only enough to dispense with, a certain amount of frothing will always occur. Ideally beer should be dispensed at 0 psi - that is the pressure at the tap. With corny kegs people have the opportunity to use lengths of beer line that, due to resistance, will drop the pressure between the storage vessel and the tap, minimising frothing. With KKs (and other budget barrels) there is virtually no distance between the tap valve and the tap opening - hence the beer hitting the glass is at a similar pressure to in the keg itself. With even a reasonably carbonated beer this will cause frothing. It is possible to fix beer line to the tap and then to a secondary tap to help with this.

2. I never primed my beer, instead relying on the slow fermentables (dextrins) in the beer to continually add gas to the keg. A good full-mash recipe will contain these dextrins (a kit may not). This works so long as you only draw small amounts at a time (eg, couple of pints 3 times a week?). Any more than this and there is not enough time to replace the gas. The drawback with priming is that because it is based on fast fermenting sugars, the beer will initially become very well primed, causing lots of froth, but then become flat again very quickly, requiring an external injection of gas to continue to draw beer from the keg. If you do prime, I think I would be tempted to reduce the amount of priming sugars so that they were just enough to give the beer condition but not so much as to make the first 5 pints 90% froth, and then slowly top up the gas for dispense only (as below).

3. Learn to prefer low carbonated beer. If you don't prime and then when the gas eventually does die out (which it will when the slow fermentables have been exhausted) you only top up with gas to a pressure sufficient enough to dispense with only, then you won't get much frothing. You won't necessarily get much of a head, but then 'real ale' doesn't usually have a head anyway. I used a Widget gas system. As soon as I noticed a slight drop in the dispense pressure I would start to give the keg a small squirt after each pint was drawn. This was enough to keep the keg topped up right to the last pint.

4. I had some problems with top tap kegs. The floats never seemed to be particularly stable, often flipping over or bouncing around as you dispensed. This invariably caused some of the head gas to come out of the tap, causing frothing as well as using up valuable dispense pressure. I much preferred the bottom tap kegs.

5. Remove sparklers from sparkler taps. The flip-top sparkler taps are 100% better than the standard drum types, but the sparkler is going to knock gas out of the beer and cause excessive froth. All that I have seen, you can unscrew the sparkler attachment.

Of course, if the keg is leaking gas, then all of the above is worthless. A keg spanner is a worthwhile investment to ensure a good gas-tight lid.

HTH

[Andy]

I found the top tap King Keg to be a pain for dispensing - it was either under too much pressure == pint of froth or too low to dispense and CO2 charge required. There was the perfect level in between the two but that would only last for dispensing a couple of pints.

I'm a cornie man now and dispense under CO2 pressure (<5psi).

[PieOPah]

Never much thought about how to attach the float. Maybe I just got lucky

[Andy]

I ended up buying a 5L jug, filling it up, froth and all and pouring the pint off from that(if I was lucky enough to get a whole pint in there).

Quality stuff Daab!

[jasonaustin]

To get round the top tap float problem, I threw the float away and simply connected a piece of tubing to the back of the tap that almost reached to the bottom of the keg - in a similar way to how a corny works. Meant I could still use my top tap keg (still useful as they can sit on the floor), but didn't have any float issues.

[jason123]

I have 4 KK TT's and have all the same problems with pouring a pint. the best way I find is to widely open the tap as quick as possible to get the bulk of the pint out then zap with a high pressure blast with the tap just a fraction open to introduce an excuse for a head on the beer.

hardly ideal and really should go towards a rack of cornies.