Commercial beer small keg

[ian1971]

Hi hoping to hook up a small keg of Larger (maybe stella ) to my kegerator . Currently got two 19l kegs through Nuka taps for my home brew .Don't drink Stella my self but a few of my mates are in to it so was hoping to add another tap with a small 5-10 l keg .Any one have any ideas

Cheers
Ian

 

[thegrantickle]

Hi hoping to hook up a small keg of Larger (maybe stella ) to my kegerator . Currently got two 19l kegs through Nuka taps for my home brew .Don't drink Stella my self but a few of my mates are in to it so was hoping to add another tap with a small 5-10 l keg .Any one have any ideas

Cheers
Ian

The smallest you'll get that in will probably be 30L, more likely 50L to be honest. Why don't you try brewing a German or Czech lager yourself instead? You'll save a lot of money on that one!

 

[Sadfield]

+1 to brew your own. There's plenty of Stella clone recipes out there, so would be interesting to tell your mates you've bought a keg of Stella and see if they notice.

 

[ian1971]

Main reason didn't fancy brew one was keg space was hoping put a small 5-10 l in behind other kegs as don't drink the stuff myself and make the beers i like

 

[Leon103]

Make a 10l batch and buy a 10l corny.

 

[Sadfield]

The issue with buying commercial might be needing to buy the correct connector for the type of keg. You could look at eebria, unlikely to have stella in small kegs, but you may find a small keg of a good craft brewery lager. Having said that though, I don't think you'll find any commercial 10L kegs with a smaller footprint than a corny,

 

[thegrantickle]

The issue with buying commercial might be needing to buy the correct connector for the type of keg. You could look at eebria, unlikely to have stella in small kegs, but you may find a small keg of a good craft brewery lager. Having said that though, I don't think you'll find any commercial 10L kegs with a smaller footprint than a corny,

Only time I've ever worked with them are in the form of 10L (even 5L) keykegs. But those are generally only used for super super fancy really expensive spontaneous fermentation or imperials. Mikkeller and Omnipollo spring to mind...

 

[stripeyjoe]

Can you get Stella in 5l mini kegs? If so it’s pretty simple to build a ball lock dispenser using a 1/4” t-piece…

 

[Northern_Brewer]

The smallest you'll get that in will probably be 30L, more likely 50L to be honest.

4.8% Stella is one of the "funnies" where the standard size is 10 gallons (44 litres), although the 4% comes in a more normal 50l. I'd imagine they do a 30l version for restaurants. They also do 6l minikegs designed for the Philips PerfectDraft system, although they work out at about £3/pint - available from BeerHawk which is also part of the Budweiser group.

The Heineken group (Moretti, Tiger etc) use the Blade system which uses 8l kegs for about the same price as the 6l PerfectDrafts. I don't know how easy it is to hack those proprietary systems to work with generic keg gear. Heineken also do some of their beers in what looks like more conventional 5l kegs.

 

[ian1971]

Can you get Stella in 5l mini kegs? If so it’s pretty simple to build a ball lock dispenser using a 1/4” t-piece…

View attachment 54933

Thanks for the info , what have you got breaking in to the keg what size pipe is that

 

[stripeyjoe]

what have you got breaking in to the keg what size pipe is that

It's a spare dip tube from a Corny keg. The thicker pipe is a 1/4" nipple with one end threaded so it screws into the 1/4" t-piece, that nipple was too long though, I replaced it with one that was about 50mm. You just pull out the red bit from the top of the mini-keg and push the adapter through, there's a centre piece in the minikeg top valve that just pushes through. There's a ton of videos of people making these on You tube, I watched a couple and cobbled this together. It holds pressure fairly well, though wouldn't try too high, max of 5-10ps1.

 

[Regfixit]

Sadly there is no such thing as Stella 4.8% anymore. Since November last year it is 4.6% and is the reason I started homebrewing again, to produce something more along the lines of the 5.2% stuff of my youth when it earned its nickname of wifebeater. I started my home bar with commercial kegs with the intention of buying Stella at first. However, I was nervous of being able to drink my way through a whole 10 gallon keg before it went off and so started with a 30L keg of Moretti.
That lasted a few weeks so there was no need to worry about shelf life .
When I bought a more portable cooler from draughtbeeronline it came with a free 30 litre Key keg of cider (that was 18months past it's sell by date, but drank OK). I now have a mix of homebrew and commercial products. At the moment I have Magners Cider, homebrew American IPA and Kirin Ichiban.

Rather than have the commercial 11 gal (Stella 10 gal) kegs in my bar, I use Corny kegs and do a closed transfer from the commercial keg to the Cornies. This makes it easy to swap them around and also take away from home to friends with the portable Lindr cooler.

I'd recommend, depending on space and budget, you either get another 19l Corny or a 10l or 5 L minikeg (Dark Farm do good ones) and simply fill it from the Stella keg. You need a coupler for the commercial kegs, but they are around £30. Stella uses a U type coupler. I initially got my kegs from kegman as they are local to me, but have since found a supplier based in Oldham - Wilds - that has a wider range and more competitive pricing.

 

[gyurmaember]

Sadly there is no such thing as Stella 4.8% anymore. Since November last year it is 4.6% and is the reason I started homebrewing again, to produce something more along the lines of the 5.2% stuff of my youth when it earned its nickname of wifebeater. I started my home bar with commercial kegs with the intention of buying Stella at first. However, I was nervous of being able to drink my way through a whole 10 gallon keg before it went off and so started with a 30L keg of Moretti.
That lasted a few weeks so there was no need to worry about shelf life .
When I bought a more portable cooler from draughtbeeronline it came with a free 30 litre Key keg of cider (that was 18months past it's sell by date, but drank OK). I now have a mix of homebrew and commercial products. At the moment I have Magners Cider, homebrew American IPA and Kirin Ichiban.

Rather than have the commercial 11 gal (Stella 10 gal) kegs in my bar, I use Corny kegs and do a closed transfer from the commercial keg to the Cornies. This makes it easy to swap them around and also take away from home to friends with the portable Lindr cooler.

I'd recommend, depending on space and budget, you either get another 19l Corny or a 10l or 5 L minikeg (Dark Farm do good ones) and simply fill it from the Stella keg. You need a coupler for the commercial kegs, but they are around £30. Stella uses a U type coupler. I initially got my kegs from kegman as they are local to me, but have since found a supplier based in Oldham - Wilds - that has a wider range and more competitive pricing.

This transfer thing sounds a brilliant idea. Thank you for sharing!