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What's so corny about them? Nothing, actually. It just so happens that one of the two big companies in the US which makes them is called "Cornelius", so people call them "Corny kegs". The other big US manufacturer is called "Firestone", so you'll also hear them called "Firestone Kegs". There is also a big German manufacturer, whose name escapes me just at the moment. You see their adverts in all the brewing magazines, though.

For most people, these soda kegs really are the utlimate solution to the bottling conundrum. They hold 20 litres, which for most people is a complete batch. Once the keg has been cleaned properly, you simply siphon the beer into it, displace the air with CO₂, and depending upon how you choose to carbonate, it can be ready to drink in less than an hour. It's quick and it's easy. The only possible downsides to such a system are first of all that it can be expensive, especially if you buy everything brand-new. Also, the kegs aren't going to fit into your kitchen refridgerator unless you take everything else out, so you're going to need a dedicated fridge for your kegs. We keep our fridge in our basement, mainly for space reasons, but you can make it look nice, and keep it in a main living area near your bar if you have the room. See Geoff Scott's page for a shining example of this.

• Bodensatz user Mike A also has a great page on fermenting in Corny Kegs

Obtaining Kegs

As noted in the above table, there is a difference between Coke kegs and Pepsi kegs, which means that your system won't be outfitted to drive both unless you explicitly do it that way. Coke kegs are called "pin lock" kegs, because the male fittings on top of the kegs where you connect the lines have pins sticking out of the sides (much like the bolts on Frankenstein's neck). The female fitting which is attached to your hose has slots which fit these pins, so that you push down and twist to connect and disconnect the lines. On these kegs, the gas line has 2 pins, whereas the beer line has 3 pins, thus making it physically impossible to get the two mixed up. Pepsi kegs are called ball-lock kegs because the female fitting has a sliding sleeve with ball-bearings inside. The sleeve is pulled back during connection and disconnection allowing the bearings to float freely. The sleeve is spring-loaded to slide back into place to lock the bearings and hold the fitting to the top of the keg. This arrangement is identical in design (though not the same size) as air-compressor fittings, as well as the special quick-snap fittings you can buy for your garden hose. With Pepsi fittings, the beer and gas fittings have a slightly different diameter which in theory should keep you from misconnecting them. Unfortunately the difference is so small that you actually can get the smaller female onto the larger male, making it extremely difficult to get it back off again.

There really isn't any advantage or disadvantage to either system. That is to say that one design isn't inherently better than the other. They'll both perform extremely well, and will be a huge step forward from your bottling regime. The only problem with Pepsi kegs is, as mentioned, you can actually get the lines mixed up. But they are at least colour coded, so if you can remember that scheme, you'll be fine. Coke kegs have a disadvantage, as well. Because of the pins sticking out of the side of the fitting, it is impossible to get a regular wrench around the things in order to remove the fittings for cleaning and maintenance. A special socket with 6 slots in the sides must be purchased for about US , allowing by-pass of the pins. If you are really handy, you can turn a regular spark-plug socket into one of these. For the price, though, we just bought ours. Other than this, either system will serve you well. We advise simply buying whatever you can get the best price on. Even if you end up with a mixed system of several Coke and Pepsi kegs, it's easy enough to set up a hybrid system, so again, take whatever is cheapest.

If you aren't happy with the pricing at your local retailer, phone around to your local Pepsi and Coke bottlers to see if they have any surplus they are selling off. Just don't then expect your retailer to help you set the thing up. Many bottlers these days are switching to the new bag-in-box technology, and are therefore selling off all their kegs for CDN each. Two years ago we actually found a bottler in Saskatoon who was doing just this. A quick request in the rec.crafts.brewing newsgroup and we'd found someone in Saskatoon who was willing to go pick them up and ship them to us. The shipping (to the other end of the country in Nova Scotia) was only about 8 bucks per keg, so we told the fellow (thanks again Greg!) that we'd give him per shipped keg. That way he made per keg for his time and trouble. A week later, 18 kegs showed up at the post office. When I went to pick them up I had to take my little hatch-back around back to load them. The postal worker who was helping me do that commented on all these kegs, and what I was doing with them. As soon as I said "homebrew", he lit right up with a huge smile on his face and said "I never thought of that!". Turned out he was a homebrewer, too. Somehow we managed to squeeze all 18 into the back of my little Plymouth Horizon!

Some people have been known to obtain kegs by approaching a friend who owns a restaurant, and offering to pay the deposit on the keg if the owner will give it to them. We'd like to point out that this is extremely illegal, and we certainly don't condone it. Both you and your friend could get into serious trouble.

Initial Assembly

Hopefully you'll be fortunate enough to have a good retailer nearby who will be able to help you put all this stuff together. Expect to pay the mid to upper range of prices given above if you are going through a retailer. For those less mechanically inclined, that's a small price to pay for a system which works well. If you are good with your hands, and want to save a few dollars, try to procure everything for the best price, and read on for instructions on how to put it all together. If you do purchase from a retailer, make sure that someone at the store is actually using a Corny system and actually knows how to tune it, because otherwise they will definitely not be able to help you balance the system.

Checking for Leaks

Now that you have your system assembled, comes the extremely important task of checking it for leaks. Take an empty keg and hook everything up as though you were going to serve beer. Check the appropriate section of this page if you are unsure at this point how to operate your regulator. Now get yourself a spray bottle and fill it with water, and put in a few drops or so of dishwashing liquid. Put the top on and give it a good shake to mix. Make sure your tap is in the closed position, crank your regulator up to about 30psi and wait for the tank to stop hissing, at which point the inside of your keg and lines is now at 30psi. If your tank keeps hissing for more than a minute, you've likely got some very serious leaks, so procede from here very quickly. Now simply go to each place where you (or the brew store) attached a hose to a fitting, and give it a squirt with the soapy water. If there's a leak, you'll immediately see bubbling, and will have to revisit this connection later to fix the problem. Most probably you didn't tighten the hose clamp enough. Don't be afraid to give it a good squeeze, as the metal part underneath isn't likely to give way very easily. Continue checking and tightening until there are no more leaks.

You should check your system regularly for leaks. Every time you fill a keg with beer and seal it, check the keg and lines for leaks. You can easily drain all your CO₂ overnight if you have a leak in your system. The fittings atop older kegs are especially suceptible to leaks (just simply from wear-and-tear), so check those as well both with CO₂ attached and detached. Spray your keg fittings and hoses with your soapy water. If you get persistant leaks, check out our maintenance section for tips on what could be wrong, and how to fix it. Usually it's nothing that a bit of plumber's tape can't fix.

You'll also want to check for leaks where your regulator connects to the CO₂ cannister. Don't be afraid to tighten that nut down really well.

Operating Your Regulator

As mentioned above, a dual-guage regulator is ideal, since it shows you not only the dispensing pressure, but also the pressure inside the CO₂ tank, which in turn allows you to see when it's getting empty. Realistically, however, when your tank does start getting empty, you'll only get about 24 or 48 hour notice between the time when you notice the tank pressure dropping, and the time when it is completely empty. That's better than nothing, but if you can get a single-guage regulator at a really good price, then by all means snap it up!

Obviously, the first thing you are going to want to do is attach your regulator to the tank. That's extremely straight-forward : it just screws on. Some regulators come with a little wrench that fits the regulator nut perfectly, allowing you to tighten it down. In fact, the wrench that came with ours has a closed end, so you have to slip the wrench over the nut before you screw the nut onto the tank. Once tightened down, the wrench cannot be removed without removing the entire regulator. The wrench does tend to clang around when moving the tank, but in general we like this feature, since we never have to worry about losing it! If yours didn't come with a wrench, just get one that fits and use it. Don't be afraid to tighten that nut down really well, and remember to check this spot for leaks by using your spray bottle.

Carbonating the Beer

Before you get around to actually carbonating your beer, you should understand a few things which will help you decide how much CO₂ you'll need. Bascially, the PSI setting which is best for your beer depends both upon the temperature of the beer, as well as the style. The cooler the beer, the lower the setting.

At the moment we don't have all of our own details in place here, so in the meantime you can have a look at the following information from The Brewery.

Although some people have great succes using priming sugar or malt extract to carbonate their kegs, we discourage it. Afterall, one of the key features of kegging your beer is that you don't have sediment in it. You've just waited 2 weeks for the beer to clear in the secondary fermenter, and now you introduce more sugar which clouds it up again as the yeast consumes the sugar. That yeast will then eventually flocc out again, giving you more sediment to deal with. Sure, it only shows up in the first two or three glasses of beer that you dispense, but why have it there at all if you don't have to? Some of the people who prime with sugar or extract claim that they get a creamier head when they prime this way. We've done a great deal of switching between priming with corn sugar, malt extract, and with CO₂ from the cannister, and quite frankly, we don't notice a difference between any of them. The lesson would be, I guess, that you shouldn't be afraid to experiment with a few different things to see which one you find best suits your own tastes. We'll give you the tools to try it all, and we whole-heartedly encourage you to do exactly that. Afterall, one of the great joys of homebrewing is making beer exactly the way you want it!

If you are using corn sugar or malt extract to prime your keg, the amount used can vary. You'll hear some people recommend that you simply use the same amount as you do when bottling, while others recommend reducing that amount to as little as 1/3 what you use when bottling. We could never figure out exactly why you'd want to use that little, since there's nothing magic about kegs that make them require less carbonation. In general, we'd recommend simply using the same amount of sugar or extract as you would with bottling. If you like, you can reduce the amount by 20% or so, but there's no need to. Just make sure you keep good records on exactly how much you do use, so that you can fine-tune the amount next time if you want. As outlined on our bottling page, we prefer weighing your priming sugar rather than measuring by volume, since it gives you more accurate results. So you're going to want about 125g (3/4 cup) of corn sugar to prime your keg. Simply boil it in 2 or 3 cups of water for about 5 minutes, then dump the water into the keg before filling the keg.

We recommend using your CO₂ tank to carbonate your beer. It's just as easy depending upon how you do it, and you'll end up with less sediment in your beer. Isn't that part of the reason you bought the kegs in the first place? The easiest way to carbonate with your keg is to simply connect the gas to it, crank the regulator to your desired PSI setting, then just leave it there for a week. When you come back after that time, you'll have a wonderfully carbonated beer to sample! The only caution with this method is that you have to be absolutely certain that your system has no leaks, otherwise you'll come back a week later to find an empty tank of gas. We cannot overstate the importance of checking your system regularly for leaks, and in generally keeping your draught system well maintained.

There is a way to use your CO₂ cannister to have your beer ready to drink in as little as 1 hour after filling it. You simply connect the tank and dial in the desired pressure setting exactly as above, then while keeping the gas connected you shake the bejeezus out of your keg to dissolve the CO₂ into the beer. Some people tip the keg over and roll it around on the floor, but that runs a higher risk of getting beer into your gas lines. We simply tip the keg slightly to one side, then rock it vigorously back and forth until the CO₂ tank stops hissing. Realistically, you'll probably want to take a break or two in there, as it could require as much as 5 minutes of constant shaking. Some folks suggest that you can speed up the carbonation by jacking the pressure up to about 1.3 to 1.5 times what you really want to have, and stopping before the tank stops hissing. Why this is indeed true, it also opens the door to over-carbonation, so we don't recommend it. Take the extra minute or two, and we'll guarantee your results. The big trick when shaking your keg to carbonated is that you have to leave it rest for at very least a half hour (and preferably an hour) before serving, otherwise you'll get a great deal of foam. Some very reputable people in the homebrewing world say that shaking your keg to carbonate can break down some of the midsized proteins, and thus have an adverse affect on head retention. We've been shaking to carbonate since about June 1997, and have yet to notice any problems in this regard. Nonetheless, let the buyer beware.

Balancing Your Draught System

On the dispensing end of your draught system, hose length is extremely important to a properly operating system. If your hose is too short, you'll get nothing but foam out of the end. If it's too long, your beer will trickle out flat. What happens is that the inside of the hose offers resistance to the beer as it passes through. The longer the hose, the more resistance. Even the different types of taps used each offer different resistance to your dispensing beer. In a properly balanced system, the resistance in your serving line should be slightly less than the force (PSI setting) coming from your regulator. Complicating matters even further, different types of hose offer significantly different resistances. The clear plastic syphon hose that we're all used to offers a lot more resistance than the opaque-white hard-plastic hose that we recommend using for the gas line. For this reason, we recommend using sypon hose in your beer lines, otherwise the length of your serving hose would have to be extremely long. The only exception to this would be perhaps if you were rigging up an extremely elaborate draught system with your beer in the basement, and taps on the kitchen counter. In such a circumstance, the great distance the beer is traveling requires a hose with much less resistance, otherwise the beer simply won't flow.

Now, in order to go any further with balancing your system, you have to understand a bit about carbonation levels in beer. If you haven't yet read this section, please do so now.

Understanding the above, there are basically two approaches you can take to balancing your system.

• trial and error
• computing a proper system balance

Although computing the proper balance is definitely the most accurate way of doing things, it isn't really that difficult to get acceptable results with trial and error. Sypon hose is pretty cheap, too, so it's no big deal if you end up throwing out a few feet of it due to "error". Get yourself 10 feet of syphon hose and cut it so that you have a 3 foot and a 7 foot length. Assemble a dispensing hose with each so that you can compare your results, and adjust hose-length accordingly. Keep in mind as well, that you can drive your system with one pressure for storage, and another (lower) pressure for serving. This technically isn't balanced properly, but it works well if you don't mind changing pressures a lot. So if your beer is coming out all foam, lower the pressure when serving, then crank it back up again for storage. See our section on serving for details.

This section not yet complete, so please stay tuned for details on computing a properly balanced system.

Filling Your Keg

Filling your keg with beer is pretty easy. If you've ever transferred beer from one fermenter to another, then you already know how to do it - more or less. First, make sure that your keg is properly cleaned and sanitized. Remove the keg lid and set it down onto a sanitary surface. We consider alu foil and saran wrap to be sanitary right off the roll

Set the keg down on the floor below the carboy full of beer that you have sitting on the counter or table. Ideally, you'll have moved the carboy there at least an hour ahead of time, to give the sediment time to settle down after moving. Make sure your cleaned and sanitized syphon hose is long enough to reach to the bottom of the keg to avoid splashing (although that's less important than normally since there will be very little oxygen in the keg), and simply syphon the beer into the keg. We always take a fresh piece of aluminum foil and mould it over the top of the keg and around the syphon hose, just to keep anything from falling in during the syphon process. We do the same to the carboy, as well. If you think you have too much beer, you'll have to peek into the keg from time to time to make sure you don't overfill it. Never fill the keg to the very top, as you need head space. The general rule is to fill it to just below the short dip-tube that's attached to the gas fitting on top the keg, so that the dip tube is not immersed in the beer. If you happen to have only enough beer for half a keg or so, that's perfectly fine since the headspace has been purged with CO₂. If you have more beer than will fit into the keg, and are going to bottle or mini-keg the rest, it's best to do that first. If you did it last, you'd be re-starting a syphon with very little beer left in the bottom of the fermenter, and that usually causes more sediment to be disturbed. But if you do the bottling or mini-keg first, you don't have this problem.

When the keg is full, simply reattach the lid and seal it tight with a blast of CO₂. The gasket on the keg lid will seal much easier if you first lube it with warm (sanitary) water. If you trust your tap water (as we do), then use it. Once that's been done, connect the the gas line to the keg and charge it up to 20-30psi. Now disconnect the gas, and if your keg has a pressure-relief valve, use it to bleed the pressure from the keg. If the keg doesn't have such a valve, you'll have to take a screwdriver and push down on the poppit of the gas valve to bleed off the pressure. Since CO₂ is heavier than air, you'll be dispelling more air than CO₂. Repeat this process another 2 or 3 times to purge your keg of air. Release the pressure one last time (with gas disconnected) and you are done. Now you're ready to carbonate your beer.

Serving Your Beer

Finally we get to the point! Afterall, this is what it's all about, isn't it? Serving your beer from a keg is one of the most satisfying parts of home-brewing. There's nothing like having a fridge with 3 or 4 kegs inside, just waiting for you and your guests to come along and start enjoying!

There isn't really much to it, once you've gotten this far. The complicated part is really the carbonation, balancing the system, maintenance and other steps which get you to this point. First make sure that the valve atop the CO₂ tank is tightly turned clockwise (closed), and that the screw on the regulator is all the way out in the off position. To serve your beer, just hook up your keg to the gas and serving lines, open the valve on top of the CO₂ tank one to two turns, then carefully tighten the screw on the regulator (clockwise) until you've reached the desired pressure (check the sections on carbonation and balancing for details). Now just open the tap whilst holding a glass underneath, and you are off to the races! If you find you're getting too much foam, keep in mind that holding the tap open full blast will actually produce less foam than if you hold it open only part way. Also, you should tilt the glass to allow the beer to cascade down the side. If it's still foamy, then you'll have to lower the setting on your regulator, bleed off a bit of pressure from your keg, and possibly revisit your system balance.

Remember that you can serve and store under two completely different pressures, which is a bit of a pain but it works. For example, in our current system, we store our kegs under 20 to 25 psi, depending upon exactly how much carbonation we want. But when it comes time to serve, we have to lower that to 8 to 10 psi by shutting off the regulator valve, bleeding pressure from the keg, then resetting the regulator to the desired pressure. Our friend Andrew, on the other hand, has his system perfectly balanced allowing him to store and serve under the same pressure. Remember if you serve and store at different pressures, that when you are done serving beer for a session, you have to charge the keg back up to the storage pressure, otherwise your beer will go flat over time. It will be fine at the lower pressure for hours on end, though, so don't fret about that.

Since we do not yet have our gas line feeding in through the side of the fridge like we plan to do (a lot of people store the tank in the fridge as well, but that takes up valuable keg space), we can't have gas connected to the kegs at all times so we often take the lazy approach to serving our beer. That means we charge the keg up to storage pressure, disconnect the gas, then simply serve beer until the pressure drops to the point where beer just trickles out, then we charge it back up again. This means of course that the first 10 or 15 glasses of beer are foamy as heck, but the foam only takes a few short minutes to settle down, so we don't worry about it. We just use a bigger glass than we'd intended to drink, since a full glass of foam is only a half glass of beer. After that, we get another 10 or 15 glasses that are just right, until finally the pressure drops too far and a recharge is required. Similarly, if you have guests over and your beer is quite foamy, just serve it into a big pitcher, throw it in the kitchen fridge for the 2 or 3 minutes it will take for the foam to settle, then serve your guests from the pitcher.

As you can see, any retailer who simply sells you a system and a length of serving hose without a peep about system balance, really doesn't have the expertise to be helping you debug your system.

Extras

When you get yourself a Corny setup, you don't just get one of the greatest ways to package your beer that you could ever imagine. Along with that, you open the door to a number of other brewing techniques which can't be done without either kegs, CO₂, or both. One such added bonus is the ability to emply a counter-pressure bottle filler, which allows you to bottle your beer without priming sugar (and therefore without sediment). Another thing you can do once you have your kegs is employ a beer filter.

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Special Thanks

We'd like to take the opportunity to thank the following people, who in their own way have each made contributions to the content of this page.

• Walt Lewis for pointing out a glowing error in our defintion of a balanced system
• Andrew Perron for showing us the light of the keg fittings with compression threads instead of hose barbs, allowing a versatile hybrid system. Actually, we really have to thank Andrew for a lot more than just this, since he's always coming up with better ways of doing things in his brewery, and we usually end up following his lead.