I went through a series of backflips with my kegerator setup in order to have two batches of homebrew ready for the Fourth party. I have three Cornelius kegs, two full-size and one metric, which is a little less than 5 imperial gallons. One of the full-size kegs has been rock-solid dependable, and the other two are flaky in that they don’t seal properly around the lids. I’ve been able to get the second full-size to work up until this weekend, when no amount of trickery, brute force, or cursing could prevent it from spitting, hissing, or foaming my precious beer out around the lid.

Friday night I decided to ditch Keg #2 and transfer it into keg #3, and a preliminary seal test was successful. Upon opening the kegerator I found both kegs sitting in about 2″ of beer. After freaking out a bit, I realized it wasn’t the faulty keg, but a bad connection on the tap connected to the good keg (keg #1), which meant I lost about 6 glasses of IPA to a slow drip.

After fixing the leak, I cleaned keg #3, sanitized it, moved the beer, put it in the kegerator and gassed it, and… it foamed out around the pressure valve. I swapped the lid from Keg #2 out and gassed that with the last of the CO2 in my tank, but still couldn’t get a clean seal. So, at the end of the night, I had two bad kegs, flat beer, and no gas.

At the homebrew store, a kind employee and I went through two replacement kegs before we found one that held a seal properly, and once I got that home everything went much smoother. The hefeweizen is carbing and tastes fine, even after having been moved four times in the last week, so hopefully it’ll stay good until the party.

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In happy house news, several large bits of heavy, pointy metal have now left the property. I enlisted my neighbor to help me hump our old kitchen radiator off the back porch (it’s been there for 6+ years) and lift the boiler from the garage up into the Scout; we then loaded his pickup with chunks of my old Scout top, a skid plate, and other assorted ferrous metals and hauled it all to the recycling center. Where they told us they don’t take metals anymore. We did recycle the copper, aluminum, and other more expensive stuff we had; I got $21 for an aluminum G5 case and several pounds of copper heatsinks. We found another recycling center down the road who takes metal, and ~400 lbs of radiator netted me another $26. $.07/lb is pretty weak, but all of that crap is GONE!