Beer Transfer Question Keg to Keg

I am a noob with what may be a dumb question.

Is there anything I am going to run into or a reason I can't transfer commercial beer from a 1/2 barrel into Corney Kegs? Yeah there is the cost of CO2 to push it but I can live with that if it means I can open up the other taps on my fridge sooner.

I think I read where you can drop the pressure way down and transfer to bottles but to keg isn't much different as far as I know. Again a noob here.

The only reason I want to do this is that I have a 1/2 barrel of commercial beer taking up my entire BevAir kegerator. I have 3 taps on it and it can physically hold 4 kegs and tap 3 kegs if they are in the smaller 1/6 barrel or Corney keg size. Where the larger 1/2 barrel takes up the entire fridge. The Commercial beer is getting down to where it should fit into 1-2 Corney Kegs and that would open the fridge up to where I could run more variety of home brew.

Worst case if this won't work for some reason I will just have to have a party. Well maybe I will have a party anyhow... The question will be what the beer list will look like....

Thanks

I do this pretty often. Low pressure, burp the corny as needed to keep the flow going. And I usually throw the corny on slightly higher pressure for a couple of days just to re-carb any lost co2 before switching to serving pressure

mack25 said:

I do this pretty often. Low pressure, burp the corny as needed to keep the flow going. And I usually throw the corny on slightly higher pressure for a couple of days just to re-carb any lost co2 before switching to serving pressure

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You mentioned burping the corney as needed to keep the flow going. Are you connecting the two kegs directly or are transferring in another method? I was saw the stickey in the top of this section of the forum about not needing a beer gun for going from keg to bottle. I was thinking of doing something like this to go from keg to keg but if there is a better way by doing a daisy chain of sort I could likely do that as well. Never thought that was an option.

I was thinking I might need to re-carb as you mentioned. That really is the only gotcha I can think of. Hate to waste a few gallons of beer in an experiment if there is something I am missing though.

I run a line from the beer-out on the commercial keg coupler to the beer-out of the corny keg. put gas on the commercial keg, and the lid on the corny. this way the corny fills from the bottom up, retaining as much carbonation as possible. I give the commercial keg quick bursts of gas rather than sustained, and every so often, just pop the pressure relief valve on the corny to keep the beer moving.

mack25 said:

I run a line from the beer-out on the commercial keg coupler to the beer-out of the corny keg. put gas on the commercial keg, and the lid on the corny. this way the corny fills from the bottom up, retaining as much carbonation as possible. I give the commercial keg quick bursts of gas rather than sustained, and every so often, just pop the pressure relief valve on the corny to keep the beer moving.

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Hmm that is a good idea that I didn't think of. How do you know when it is full? Go by rough weight? The challenge of a 1/2 that has been tapped for a while is, hmm how much is in there? I want to have 2 Corneys ready when I do this and I have 2 x 20# CO2 bottles. One full on stand by at all times. So I should be good.

Thanks for the tip on this by the way.

Yep, rough weight. and stop when beer spits out of the pressure relief valve when burping it happy to help