Why you should use hose clamps on your beer lines

When I was putting my keezer together I used some rather narrow line that had to be quickly softened in boiling water to slide it over the barbs on either end of the keg and tailpiece. I didn't bother with hose clamps because I thought they were on really tight. Oops.

The beer in question was a bad batch of stout that was sitting around to see if it improved with age. Apparently it was listening when we brewed the last batch and talked about dumping it to make room. It got even... A full 5 gallons shot out pushed by the last of my CO2 tank which was almost emtpy.

Now all of my lines are clean and the hoses are nicely arranged inside the lid instead of just dangling. No (good) beer was harmed in this endeavor.

I opened the keezer to find this:

That doesn't seem right....


Oh crap...


That isn't supposed to happen...


It's a 4" deep kiddie pool of beer


A job for BLC

Oh man that must've been a pain to clean up. That is actually another up side though... in a keezer it will all just pool in the bottom as long as your drain plug is in. Could you imagine opening a kegerator and finding that?

I probably would get a pot or something and ladle it out and get drunk.

lol -- how appropriate:

TomSD said:

Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions they're easier to handle than dumb mistakes!

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"Hey guys -- you think I can skip hose clamps on my pressurized beer lines that are hooked up to gallons of beer pushed by a nearly endless supply of CO2?"

heh

bolts said:

lol -- how appropriate:



"Hey guys -- you think I can skip hose clamps on my pressurized beer lines that are hooked up to gallons of beer pushed by a nearly endless supply of CO2?"

heh

Click to expand...

Haha yeah I use that on my clients so I figured it was a good one to put in my signature on the forums I use.

Oh I feel your pain, but my experience wasn't quite that dramatic, though I give it a few more points for pain-in-the-a$$ factor.

The first day I tapped my first ever keg in my first shiny new kegerator, I didn't bother with hose clamps either. I went to bed content that I was in beer heaven.

In the morning, I noticed some liquid pooling around and running out where the tap tower met the top of the kegerator. WTF? I followed the liquid and saw that it had run down the back of the kegerator, but not enough to get on the floor thankfully.

I popped the lid off the tower and saw the tiniest bit of beer just hissing ever so slowly out of the tap shank inside. It ran down the interior of the tower, got through the seal, out and across the top and down. But it gets worse.

The beer found its way UNDER the top of the kegerator. I had to disassemble it, unscrew the laminated particleboard top and there found the day's project: cleaning the beer out from under and around the plastic seal that separated the top from the inside chamber. It was about a 4 hour job to get it all. I didn't want any hint of nasty, stale, disgusting frat house basement smell anywhere in my home. I'm a friggin adult, after all.

Lesson learned. Hose clamps = cheap peace of mind.