My brother “acquires” items from time to time. I saw him yesterday and he gave me something he thought I could use.
A quarter keg:
I had some hesitations but took it anyway. He said he was going to throw it out if I didn’t take it. I just couldn’t see something like this go to waste.
My main hesitation in taking the keg was how to properly clean and sanitize this quarter keg for dispensing homebrew. I have not done much investigation into it, outside of reading some posts that confirmed my fears that this thing is hard to clean and sanitize. 🙂
What do you think? Is there a way that I can use this for storing and serving homebrewed beer?
Should I just open up the top and make it a secondary kettle?
What are the options?
Jimmy
Without special tools, yeah they’re pretty much impossible to clean. And they take up more room in a kegerator than cornies. If it’s clean, you can sanitize it no problems — just fill ‘er up, hook it to gas, a dispense a few pints of sanitizer (dump the rest to save gas). If it’s dirty… it’ll make a nice brew kettle.
JW
+1 on turning it into a brew kettle. Its not worth trying to re-use it as a keg on the homebrew level.
-JW
Gabriel Nagmay
I also had an extra quarter barrel. Once you cut off the top, they make an excellent 7gallon pot. We use ours to heat the strike/sparge water. Much easier to handle then the 15 gallon size.
James
If you pull the spear out you’ve got a nice fermenter for a 5-6 gallon batch. They aren’t that difficult to clean, you just need to remove some of the check valves from a sanke tap. Pump cleaner, then water, then sanitizer into an inverted keg. If your going to serve from it then it really is best to make sure you have very little sediment in your beer, so either filter it or transfer to a corny and cold crash it then transfer to this guy.
I much prefer the slim quarter barrels but its hard to turn down something stainless.
mark m
American sanke style kegs are barely more difficult to handle than cornies. I have been using 1/6 barrel kegs for a couple years because that’s what I had on-hand. They work great. If you have a pump, you don’t even need to take the spear out to clean them, like James said…
Shawn
If there is a local microbrewery to you, take it down there and offer them $5 to throw it on their keg cleaner…at least that way to you know it’s without a doubt sanitary…
Chris
you can purchase a keg washer/filler head from breweryparts.com for around $100.
snowflake
I saw one the other day in a beer store. They cut it back to about 7 gal with nice smooth edges – nice job. No spiggot and I think they were asking about $55. Really heavy without anything in it.
PS: there’s sereral decent video;s on youtube about converting to a brew kettle