Good beer pouring badly

[Craig Farrand]

Hi everyone, I need help.

I run the bar at a local bowling club and have been introducing some good beers to the menu.

As well as the standards Lion Brown, Speights, We currently have 3 Parrot dog beers on tap.

The Lion and Speights pour well However the Parrotdog beers to not. The first part in the line pours ok but then a huge amount of fizz. This was also a problem with the Panhead beers when we had them on tap.
The system was set up for the old Lion Brewery beers so i'm just wondering if a different gas pressure or something is needed for the craft beer dispensing? So far the guy the does the system has been unable to fix it.

Its Costing me alot of money and credibility at the moment so any ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[Smiffy]

I would suspect too much pressure. 

What is the CO2 pressure, the temperature of the kegs, and what level of carbonation do the brewers say the beers should be at?

[Craig Farrand]

Hi Smiffy, thanks for the reply. We have only one regulator which does the Lion beers as well as the Craft. We have had this set on 13PSI in the past, but have recently bought this down to 10-11psi. The Lion beers still pour ok but the Craft beer still foamy.

The exact terminology evades me but I believe its 2.4 x quantity of CO2/keg.

The cool room is a good 10m from the taps and the lines are probably closer to 13m. There are no pumps involved only gas pressure. The lines themselves are quite big diameter as back in the day it was setup to pour lots of jugs of flat suger water (aka Lion Brown).

We have recently put in a new glycol system which keeps the lines cool, the coolroom is at about 0.5-1degC.

Cheers for your input

Craig

[Smiffy]

For a carbonation level of 2.4 volumes, the chart I use says that you want about 8 psi at your current temperature (with 10-11 psi you are around 2.7 volumes).

Personally, I think that is way too cold to be able to enjoy any taste, but too cold does seem to be the NZ fashion even for nice ales.

If you reduced the pressure to 8psi, and you want to leave the temperature the same, and the problem is still not resolved, increasing the restriction in the lines is the next step. As mentioned, longer or smaller diameter lines will slow down the flow out of the tap. An alternative is to put a clamp on the hose. I have done that in the past, and you can use it reduce the speed of the flow to a certain extent, but if you clamp it too much, you will generate bubbles in the line and your problem will be even worse.

At the end of the day, I think you should get a separate CO2 regulator for the craft ales, and, store them at a more "cellar" like temperature, ale needs to be up around 10 C for the flavours to come through, ask any Englishman.

[Nathan]

Could be an issue with equalization....Beer line length you actually one want around 1 psi at the tap so increasing the line length will help, Trust me i learnt the hard way   

[Cain Harland]

Or as Nathan pointed out when he saw the pics of my original beer lines, narrower inner diameter has the same effect as more length, that is reducing the pressure at the tap. I have about 3m of line now, it would have taken about 10m of the original stuff to get the same pressure reduction. None of the calculators seemed to work very well for me so after the initial failure I just bought more than I needed and started with 6m and chopped .5m off at a time until the flow rate seemed about right. Changing the type of line you use might not be an option but you could easily get 2 or 3 times the current length and do what I did. I would suspect the likes of Lion and Speights are more highly carbonated (higher pressure) and have less head retention (so foam disappears quickly) than the craft beers.

Do you have the ability to control the CO2 pressure to individual kegs? If you can, look at this before replacing lines. If you have over carbonated the beer by having it at too high pressure it can take a while for it to stop foaming (as the CO2 comes out of solution) even if you are letting excess CO2 out but pouring pints of pulling the release valve every so often.

Have you tried running the craft through the Lion line, and tap and vice versa?

[Carl]

I can attest to beer lines being science.

I went from great pours to a foamy mess with one batch where I overpressured it and it screwed up the other keg and I couldn't fix it. I eventually traced it to stratification in the lines due to the length, diameter, and temp differential with the lines sitting mainly at the top of the kegerator.

I now use two regulators to deal with generally always having an english bitter/stout and a lager/pale ale on tap that want different pressures (10 vs 14) and now use short narrow diameter vinyl lines (1.5m x 3.5mm ID vinyl) that don't wind all over the place.

It sounds like you may want to consider a separate regulator for the higher volume craft beers which then requires getting the line science right. That means lots of reading and calculating.