Dumb fitting question (MFL)

Hey guys, I have been bottling for a couple years now, but my awesome wife bought me kegging gear for Christmas, and I'm still trying to get it all put together. I need to buy some stuff like clamps and some extra disconnects and keg lube, but one thing has me puzzled.

I see a lot of kegging posts on here where people say "MFL awesome, barbed bad" and the explanation that it's harder to remove a hose from a barbed fitting.

What I don't understand and couldn't find a clear explanation of is whether you stick the hose on the MFL and clamp it, or whether the MFL is just to screw on a swivel nut/barb fitting (the two disconnects my wife bought are like that). If it's the latter, isn't it still hard to get the hose off the barb? Is the advantage just that you can unscrew the hose + barb from the rest of the (disconnect, manifold, whatever)?

If you need to disconnect a beer or gas line for cleaning, reconfiguration or troubleshooting, it's a heck of a lot easier if all of the terminations are done with flare fittings.

Yes, there's still a barb involved...



...but the point is you can break and make connections without loosening clamps and cutting tubing...

Cheers!

Thanks, that's about what I figured, I was just having a hard time finding where somebody explicitly said so. Sadly, my manifold is all barb fittings, but at least I can make the other ends easier to take apart.

I told you it was a dumb question, but at least now I know what I still need to buy!

Depends on your manifold. A lot of them are just 1/4 NPT to barbs attached to the manifold. You could replace the barbs with NPT to MFL fittings without much hassle in that case.