To glycol or not

I just bought the coolest ceramic dual faucet tower for the kegerator I am building. The problem is that it is filled with insulation and a glycol cooling hose is running up and back down through the tower. I am worried about foam on my first pour...So, should I:

A) Take out all the insulation (not hard) and force cold air to the top of the tower

B) Connect the cold air hose from the cooling fan that I will be installing to the glycol hose. This will basically have cold air running through a hose next to the faucet hoses.

C) Build a glycol cooling system (loud and probably not gunna happen).

The glycol wouldn't be very difficult to do. Just keep a container of glycol in the kegerator with your beer and put a small submersible pump to recirculate the glycol through the tower. It wouldn't need to run all the time, just turn it on until the lines are chilled.

How large of a container would be needed? Is it really that much better than if I forced cold air up the tower?

If your beer isn't traveling a long distance, glycol isn't necessary. A simple computer fan will work well. Do you really want glycol in your kegerator?

glycol or glycerol?

I have a "walk-in" cooler that is a full 30 feet from my bar. On top of the bar I have a coffin box with six taps. all of my lines are run from the walk-in, behind a wall, in from the side of the bar (through a wall) and up into the tap box through insulated PVC pipes.

... and I don't refridgerate the lines at all.

At first I had a small computer fan to push a tiny bit of cold air from the walk-in through the 3" PVC carrying the lines, up into the coffin box and then back to the cooler through a 2" return PVC pipe. After a week I realized I didn't even need that. My lines are at the bottom of a basement wall and just the temp of the beer in the lines and the tiny bit of air that gets into the pipes from the cooler keeps the beer cold.

I host about half of my brew clubs meetings at my house down in my bar and we usually have between 15 and 25 folks show for each meeting... and I've never had anyone ever say anything about warm or off beer due to some sort of warm-temp-related infection or anything like that and I've never had a foaming problem.

That's my VERY long way of saying that I think glycol for a regular kegerator is probably way over the top. I run 30 feet of line on nothing by ambient temperature inside of insulated PVC.

Getting your tower cooled a bit certainnly won't hurt but I would be much much more concerned with making sure your lines are balanced in terms of PSI... That'll make a much bigger difference than getting the tower cooled. There are a bunch of sites you can google that will give you all of the line/PSI balancing equations (what length and what internal diameter at what pressure).

A small 12 CFM fan is the way I think I will go.

+1- Motorhead- OVERKILL!

I just got my kegerator up and running in November and have poured about 12 gallons of beer since then. I have the parts to make a tower fan if I decide to go that route . . . but I've noticed that I don't think I really need it. The difference between a first pour and a second pour is no more than 3/4" of foam, which when you drink out of 19 or 22 oz pilsner glasses like I do just looks like a perfect head. I had some foam issues when I first started, but switching from 5 feet to 10 feet of liquid line solved that quickly. A 22 oz pour at 10 psi takes about 10 seconds and foam is not really an issue.

Cape Brewing said:

I have a "walk-in" cooler that is a full 30 feet from my bar. On top of the bar I have a coffin box with six taps. all of my lines are run from the walk-in, behind a wall, in from the side of the bar (through a wall) and up into the tap box through insulated PVC pipes.

... and I don't refridgerate the lines at all.

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Ok, we need pics here. Lot's O pics please.

I've been planning on running lines from my fridge downstairs about 10' up to taps in my kitchen, always planned on running cooling lines, but maybe they are not needed?

conpewter said:

I've been planning on running lines from my fridge downstairs about 10' up to taps in my kitchen, always planned on running cooling lines, but maybe they are not needed?

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At 10' you may get away with a good fan setup. It depends on the ambient temp of the room your fridges is in.

EdWort said:

Ok, we need pics here. Lot's O pics please.

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The bar is in my gallery.

I'll drop one of the cooler in my gallery as well although it's kind of a crappy pic.

If I ever get my stupid AG rid finally done, I'm going to try to take some nice pics "from grain to glass" on how I do everything all through my rig, down into the cooler and then served at the bar.

conpewter said:

I've been planning on running lines from my fridge downstairs about 10' up to taps in my kitchen, always planned on running cooling lines, but maybe they are not needed?

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I would definitely suggest insulating them really well. The 3" PVC pipe-method I went with seems to be working really well since you can buy pre-shaped insulation made specifically for insulating it. Like I was saying before, my lines sit about a foot off of my basement floor, running between the concrete and an insualted wall so the ambient temperature never gets that warm, even in the heat of August. I had a small blower and built the whole system up so I could have a closed loop of cold air circulating from my walk-in to the tap box and back... but after two weeks I shut the fan off and haven't used it since.... and it's been about a year now that I've been running it with no problems.

My GUESS (and it's a guess)... is that, if you have your lines balanced properly you probably won't need much more than insulating the lines. When pouring a beer, I would suggest drawing off a quarter of a pint to clear out any beer that was in the line (I dunno... It just seems a little flat to me in mine... maybe I'm being paranoid), dump it and pour your beer. My guess is it'll be perfectly cold and it won't foam if your lines are blanaced pressure-wise.

+1 on no need for glycol for a tower. The Keezer doesn't even have a cooling fan in it - I was going to, and it was designed with one in mind, but it just hasn't needed it. The amount of beer that is in the lines from the freezer to the faucet is so small, that unless the first daw of the day from a tap is just a tiny sample for someone, it's plenty cool.

Cape Brewing said:

The bar is in my gallery.

I'll drop one of the cooler in my gallery as well although it's kind of a crappy pic.

If I ever get my stupid AG rid finally done, I'm going to try to take some nice pics "from grain to glass" on how I do everything all through my rig, down into the cooler and then served at the bar.

Click to expand...

That is an awesome looking bar!