Sunday, September 30, 2012

What's a Cornelius Keg?

By Lemar Gleit


If you've been brewing your own beer for much time, you've in all probability accumulated a fairly large selection of bottles to contain all that home brewed beer. Bottles may be practical since they are so portable, and they also contain what a lot of people consider to be one serving of beer. Yet you have very likely also considered just how great it would be to serve your personal homemade ale and lager from your very own draft system. You realize, undoubtedly, that commercial beer kegs are certainly not convenient to open without having specially designed equipment, so filling them with home brewed beer would probably be a challenge. Could there be a solution?

Thankfully for us, there are actually several. A popular choice is referred to as a "Party Pig". It's essentially a big jug that rests on its side inside the 'fridge, and features a faucet in the front for you to pour a mug of beer from. This can be a really simple type of draft system, and is a very good alternative for folks who do not have space for kegs and a CO2 bottle in the refrigerator. It's pretty compact, and also provides the advantage of being extra portable than standard kegs.

An additional choice, the one that this article is concerned with, is termed a Cornelius, or "Corny", keg. Those who worked in restaurants during the 1980s or early 1990s, maybe you are no stranger to these as the containers that soft drink syrup would come in. "Bag in box" containers are far more common now, which fortunately works out good for us, given that those abandoned canisters, when cleaned, can be excellent kegs that we can use for home brew.

Cornelius kegs have the benefit of being easy to open up for cleaning and filling, and they hold 5.5 gallons of beer -- the perfect size for your five to five and a half gallon batch of home brew. They're considerably less difficult to transport than standard half-barrel kegs, even though naturally they are not quite as easy to take with you as Party Pigs and bottles. Should you have an extra 'fridge that you will be able to make into a keg 'fridge, you can fit a number of Corny kegs in addition to a five pound CO2 bottle so that you could have diverse varieties of home brewed beer on draft. If you are ambitious, it is possible to drill holes through the door of your 'fridge to install faucets, otherwise you could just leave the door alone and use the small plastic "picnic faucets" that you may well recall from your college party days.

There are 2 key kinds of Cornelius kegs that you will find. Those previously used by Coca-Cola are recognized as "pin lock" type kegs, and they're a bit more uncommon, though definitely not hard to find. Home brewers appear to favor those coming from Pepsi, referred to as "ball-lock" type kegs. I am not sure the purpose for that inclination; it may possibly have more to do with accessibility than anything else. I have made use of both, and I truly liked the pin-lock kegs slightly better, though my own existing setup is ball-lock. Despite the fact that there's absolutely nothing bad with making use of both types, you'll probably believe it is less complicated to manage having just a single type, to ensure that you don't need to figure out which components go with which kegs; parts from ball-lock kegs aren't interchangeable with those from pin-locks, and vice-versa..

Cornelius kegs are a fantastic way for home brewers to keg their very own homemade beer. The moment you start, you are going to question why you did not do it sooner. You are able to nonetheless bottle just a few occasionally if you wish to bring them to friends' houses or enter them in competitions, but apart from that, there's absolutely nothing quite like being able to serve yourself a glass of your own home brew, out of your own draft system.




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