I just wanted to share my experience with my second time kegging, without any specific question.
I filled my keg on a Thursday night, only to discover I was out of CO2. I went and got some gas on Friday, and seeing how I had trouble with over-carbonation with my first keg, I decided to do the "set and forget" method. So I hooked up CO2 at 12 PSI for my keggerator which only gets down to 45F. After 5 days of waiting the beer was certainly carbonated but still a little flat for my taste. So being impatient and all having already waited 5 days I decided to give her a shake with the gas on. I shook the keg 3 times for about 5 seconds each, followed by one last big shake for about 30 seconds. This morning when I tested it it was SUPER FOAMY and certainly over carbonated.
It sure seems like the shake method is extremely volatile and hard to control, whereas the set and forget method takes too stinking long! There's always priming the entire keg but that would take at least as long as the set and forget method.
My experience generally is that kegging is still pretty awesome, but it's not as big of a time saver as people might think. The real benefits are 1. You tend to drink more beer, and 2. Less work to clean and sanitize and no more fooling around with bottles.
I filled my keg on a Thursday night, only to discover I was out of CO2. I went and got some gas on Friday, and seeing how I had trouble with over-carbonation with my first keg, I decided to do the "set and forget" method. So I hooked up CO2 at 12 PSI for my keggerator which only gets down to 45F. After 5 days of waiting the beer was certainly carbonated but still a little flat for my taste. So being impatient and all having already waited 5 days I decided to give her a shake with the gas on. I shook the keg 3 times for about 5 seconds each, followed by one last big shake for about 30 seconds. This morning when I tested it it was SUPER FOAMY and certainly over carbonated.
It sure seems like the shake method is extremely volatile and hard to control, whereas the set and forget method takes too stinking long! There's always priming the entire keg but that would take at least as long as the set and forget method.
My experience generally is that kegging is still pretty awesome, but it's not as big of a time saver as people might think. The real benefits are 1. You tend to drink more beer, and 2. Less work to clean and sanitize and no more fooling around with bottles.