Have you ever gone to one of your kegs and found ZERO carbonation?   Your heart falls, while your brain races through a list of questions.  What the heck happened, when did it happen, when was the last time I checked this keg; and is my beer RUNIED?  More questions… is the CO2 tank empty, is it leaking, is the regulator broken, is the connection bad or is the leak coming from the keg ?  Once you work past the SHOCK, you attach another CO2 tank; this time really checking your every move, carb the beer and hope for the best.  This has happened to us, usually right before bottling for a competition OR, just before loading the keg into the car for a party.  UGH!  

Enter in a change in process:

Here we have three cleaned kegs, poppets removed, deep cleaned and replaced.  Pro Tip:  You can’t sanitize a dirty keg.  ;) Then we add a couple gallons of Star San to the keg, (one of our viewers stated that he FILLS the keg with Star San- personally I would LOVE to test that out… Full Keg vs. partial keg of Star San),  then we swish it around inside the keg and we flip it over so that we get the backside of those poppets just to be on the safe side.  Next, we attach the CO2 gas.

Use 10 to 15 PSI just for a few seconds. 

Using a transfer hose made by the cameraman.

I just had a piece of tubing and then my two fittings, and then this is threaded barb. The ones I have we have are threaded fit.

These are available without barbs too, but here is a barbed fitting which my camarman prefers. 

Pro tip:  Gray is for gas and Black is for beer.

Pro tip:  have a separate set of wrenches for beer stuff.  t

Now put the black one on the out Liquid line.

So just remember black is for beer. The other end of the hose is gray and gets attached to the gas poppit.

Now, Star san is being transferred from one keg through the tubing over to another keg, sanitizing everything on the way.

When working with Star San you are going to see and have bubbles - lots of bubbles.  Repeat this process for every keg.  If you are only sanitizng one keg then return your Star San to your bucket.

Our favorite reason for this process:

First, it’s really cool to have a CLEAN -SANITIZED and  PRESSURIZED keg ready when you have beer ready.  But our favorite reason, is this way you can tell if you have a leaky keg.  When we go grab one of these clean, sanitized, and pressurized kegs and test for pressure, and there’s no pressure, we know we have a leaky keg before we put the beer in. We hope this helps.  Thanks a Pint for reading. 

The inspiration for this blog and video on our YouTube channel came from Drew Beechum he shared that this is his process and we think it’s brillant - Thanks Drew

Rahshal

Prefer to watch the Video - click down below.  :)