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Ah, the joys of bottling.
Weighing out and mixing a priming sugar solution, filling fifty-some individual bottles, inevitably spilling a sticky mess all over the floor, capping everything, and waiting two glorious weeks for your beer to finish.
Well, those days are over.
Just kidding, it's glass. I'm not going to throw it.
Hi. I'm Ryan from Northern Brewer, and this is the Northern Brewer kegging system.
This is going to turn what used to take weeks into something that can be done in theoretically a couple of hours.
It's going to come with almost everything you see here; your choice of a new or a used keg, a CO2 line, a liquid serving line with a picnic faucet on the end of it, and a regulator.
The only thing that it doesn't come with is a CO2 tank and that's because you can choose what size you're going to buy, whether it's a 5-pound, 10-pound, or a 20-pound CO2 tank.
Now let's take a look at how some of this stuff works.
One of the nicest things about having a kegging system is that you don't have to clean and sanitize all of those individual bottles.
Now we're only going to have to worry about one vessel.
You're going to want to make sure to take everything apart per the instructions that came with the kit.
Make sure that everything is nice and clean; especially if you're getting the used keg,
you're going to want to make sure that sits for maybe even 24 hours in some sort of a cleaning solution to get any of the gunk out that's sitting in there.
Then we're going to put all the pieces back together; the posts, the lid, the dip tubes, and all of that.
And once it's all put back together, we can sanitize it.
Just fill it up with some sanitizer, let it sit for a couple of minutes, dump that out, and we're ready to transfer.
All we have to do is remove the lid. Set that aside in a little bucket of sanitizer.
And you can grab your siphon tubing. Transfer directly into the keg as opposed to going into your bottling bucket filled with priming sugar.
Fill it up to the top. Remove the siphon tubing. Put your lid back on.
And simple as that, we're ready to carbonate.
The kegging kit comes with everything that you need for carbonation.
Right here we have our gray gas disconnect. I like to remember that G is for gray, G is for gas, so I don't mix up the two disconnects.
To use this, all you have to do is pull back on the ring. That will disengage the little ball locks on the inside.
And we simply set it on our posts, push down, and it will lock into place.
Now you want to make sure that you put it on the correct post.
One way to tell is if it's labeled 'In' or 'Out' -- 'In' for the carbonation.
Not all kegs have that on there, so another way to definitely be sure is to look at the post itself.
If it has little knicks in the ring down here, that means it is a gas post.
And if we look over here at the liquid, you'll see that there are not any knicks around the base of it, so this is our liquid out. It's also labeled as 'Out'.
So you can look for either the 'In' or the 'Out' or look for the knicks in the base.
Now to remove the disconnect, all you have to do is pull up on the ring here. That will disengage the ball locks again. And you can simply pull up.
One of the most important parts of the kegging system is going to be the regulator since that's going to allow us to put the CO2 into the keg.
Now as you see here, there are many parts to it.
There's a shutoff valve, there's a body, a low-pressure gauge, which shows how much CO2 is going into the keg, and a high-pressure gauge, which shows how much CO2 is left in the cylinder.
As you can see, this is turned on so the dials are up like this.
Now to change -- to change how much CO2 is going into your keg, you can take a screwdriver and turn this screw to the right.
As you see, the pressure is going up.
As you turn to the left, the pressure starts to go down.
Now you want to refer to the instructions that come with your kegging system to see what the appropriate level of CO2 is to put into your beer.
There's a handy little chart that shows what the style is, how many volumes of CO2, and what the equivalents are as far as PSI and temperature.
This is how the regulator is going to come in the box, and it also comes with this little flared nylon washer here.
This is going to sit between the regulator and the CO2 tank.
As you can see, one of these sides has a flare on it; the other side does not.
You're going to want to make sure that that flared side faces away from your CO2 tank and the little raised edge in here sits in this little divot right here.
It will kind of fall into place right there.
And once it's in there, you can then take your regulator and put it over the top of it and then screw it into your tank.
Now this is going to help prevent any CO2 from escaping from this connection right here.
Another thing to keep in mind is that any metal-on-metal connection is going to need some sort of leak stopper.
For this connection right here with your CO2 hose, you could use some Teflon tape.
Another thing you can do is get this small flared nylon washer, which is sold separately. It kind of sits right here between the swivel nut and the flare right here.
What you can do is pop it into your little swivel nut and then you can screw it directly on to your shutoff valve.
And the last piece of hooking this all up is going to be adding the foam-free tubing kit.
This is our black liquid disconnect. I like to remember B for black, B for beer.
You will engage this the same way that we did with the gas.
Pull back on this, put it on top of the posts, push it down, and it will lock into place.
Again, remember to make sure that this is the liquid outside, meaning there are no notches in the base here, or that it says 'Out'.
And once your beer is all cooled and properly carbonated, it's time to serve it up.
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This is so much better than bottling.
Mmm, good beer.