Anybody here have a draft beer tap in their kitchen or garage? Anyone know how long a pony keg lasts once it has been tapped?
We never got more than two weeks of usable life out of keg in a home system, and once the keg started down hill, it REALLY went fast. And the cooling mechanism raised my power bill by about $100 a month.
I agree with Dr. Strangelove, I've seen it done in frat houses, etc and it always ends up being a great theory but horrible in practice. Best thing to do is to talk your neighbor into doing it and drop by for a beer every day. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Holy SH*T! How does it end up costing so much? Why would it be any more than a second refrigerator? It seems like it should be less than a second fridge; likely smaller and hardly ever opened. I'm interested in this too since I homebrew and want to start kegging.
a good friend of mine owns a brewry/restaurant and has a tap in his kitchen...he says a keg lasts about a month...not sure what size it is though.
the best kegs to use for home brew are the stainless 5 gallon pre mix soda containers. not sure where to source them in your locale but a little searching should turn them up. ask your brew supply dealer. the way to keep draft fresh is to use an inert gas like co2 or nitrogen to push the beer. it's a simple thing to modify a fridge for the 5 gal container. you can get 4 or 5 in a regular fridge.
I would bet he has a professional Nitrogen / CO2 or Argon / CO2 based system in his house. Most of the off the shelf home systems I have seen, and the one we had, did not work like the pro stuff that was in my bars. Also, the kegs when delivered to my house were never the same temp as the ones to the bar, so you had to cool it down and then, as no one drank more than about 6 beers a week, the keg just sat there in the firg but with a non-noble gas inside it so... well you get the picture. The biggest problem I found was the beer in the tube to the tap would go bad, so the first pour after a day or two had to go down the drain, if not the secound one, too. I am sure you can have professional systems installed, and there may be some good cheap ones out there now days, but I would expect them to cost a ton and you do get what you pay for. (But, hey, I bought a car that is a piece of crap in the rain so what do I know about spending money??? )
