Saving commercial keg beer

I attended a party this weekend that, while fun, was pretty weak in the beer-drinking department. Gedvondur and I volunteered to rescue the remnants from the half-barrel of New Glarus Spotted Cow as to not let it go to waste. We ended up filling 2 1/2 5-gallon cornies out of the half-barrel, which means we drank about 3 gallons of beer at the party. I feel like I totally underachieved...

Anyway, we cut the picnic tap off the end of the hose that screws onto the Sanke tap and replaced it with a ball-lock fitting. We ran the beer into the cornies through the liquid out post and used a picnic tap to vent the gas off. Instead of holding it open, we flipped the handle around backwards which is about halfway open.

It went pretty well; the kegs filled in about 7 or 8 minutes. We were able to track the level in the kegs from the condensation. There was a fair amount of foam coming out the gas line after a while; some of that was from the star-san, and some of it was from the beer. We used 12 psi of pressure to push, which may have been too much. It would have been nice to bleed the pressure off the Sanke, but we lost less than a pint of beer total in the foam.

This was good practice for us because we will lager in corny kegs, and we'll push it out.

uhh.........didn't someone lose their deposit on the commercial tap when you cut of the picnic tap?

I also do this for parties and what-not... https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=20851

No, someone did not lose their deposit on the tap. We bought the sanke fitting and picnic tap from Micromatic. We didn't have anything else with the right fittings (LHBS was closed)...the choice between sacrificing 12 gallons of beer or a picnic tap was an easy one. I've got the correct parts on order for us to do this again, though.

I've done this quite a few times. We get quite a few partial kegs returned in the brewery and I'm more than happy to save the beer from the drain. If the keg came back and they were using a hand pump, I usually just take the keg home and have friends come over to finish it as quick as we can. However, if they were using Co2 to serve, I'll jump it into a corny and it's destined for the kegerator.

The only difference when I do it, is I just use the pressure relief valve to bleed pressure out of the corny rather than hooking up another picnic tap. Also did you purge the corny of O2 before you transferred?

Two kegs were freshly star-sanned. We did not purge them of O2, but the beer fills in from the bottom and will release CO2 as it enters the keg. It may not *all* be out, but most of it. The beer was only about halfway up when we started pushing star-san foam out the vent tap, so we were purging air as it went.

The last keg (a partial) was pushed into a just-emptied keg from a different beer, so that one should have been O2-free.