Cleaning kegs has become one of those… things. It’s like when you have been up real late and you just ate the last bowl of chili. You know the crockpot needs to be cleaned out, but damn it you just want to go to bed! Well, you have to force yourself to clean it out otherwise it’ll dry, or grow, but you do the next best thing. You stick the pot under the sink and pour some dish soap in the pot and fill it with hot water and go to bed – WIN! That is the elaborate metaphor for what I accomplished to tackle the inevitable conflict of the keg, the kitchen faucet and sprayer, and me. I hate the kitchen sprayer because it doesn’t fully close off the faucet so I have water coming out of the sprayer, and more water still coming out of the faucet. UGH! I need hot water, but I don’t want to waste a ton of water in the process. Usually I stick a jug under the faucet and pour it in the keg after it is full while using the sprayer to fill the keg at the same time. As you can imagine, water usually ends up on the floor or myself as I will inevitably miss the narrow hole of the keg because the hose of the sprayer is just 3 inches shy of letting the faucet actually get inside the keg. If it hasn’t caught on by now, details like these are the largest contributors to pissing me off other than that guy who insists on picking the urinal next to me when there is plenty of other perfectly good urinals NOT next to me and then decides he wants to talk to me and THEN tries to make eye contact by leaning over while chatting it up. Moving on!

After some strange looks and scratching of the heads at the hardware store I came out with a faucet adapter, bushing, and a threaded, barbed elbow fitting that will allow me to convert a faucet into a high-pressure keg filler. This mamma-jamma will blast hot water through the liquid dip tube of the keg at seriously high pressure. How much pressure are we talking here? Let’s just say what used to take almost 8-10 minutes now takes about a minute. The extra benefit is that any sanitizer or cleaner put in prior to filling will be mixed and diluted perfectly by the time the keg is full, and add to the fact that by sealing the keg with a lid you can simultaneously pressurize the keg which can be used to then fill the dip tube with said cleaner/sanitizer. I’d say this is the best $10 I’ve spent all day! I think the worst part was realizing how nasty my current faucet fittings were. I was able to clean, rinse, and sanitize a keg in less than half the time I’d normally spend standing in the kitchen waiting for the kegs to fill with water! Of course, with such inventions comes energy to brew on!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.