Keg Horror Stories

We recently had a terrible blunder. We underestimated how much we needed to clean some cornies that had been sitting under pressure in a warehouse for god knows how long. We washed them with hot water for a long time and then decided our trusty friend starsan would do the rest. But oh man, we've never made a worse decision in our lives. When I pulled a sample the next day to see how it was carbing up it tasted like pure sewage! and that smell...! We dumped two whole kegs. I've never not been able to at least drink our beer before.

Never again will we not PBW soak the living daylights out of them. We found out the hard way that starsan should in no way be used for "cleaning". It's time to get freaky with our cleaning procedures.

The purpose of the thread is to see if there is anyone out there that is willing to commiserate with us and share some cleaning horror stories! It's nothing a little homebrew in us can't fix...too bad 10g of it just went down the drain.

That stinks - pun intended

Not necessarily cleaning related, although it might be - Last night I went to connect the liquid line to my keg, but I couldn't get the pin lock disconnect on far enough to lock it into place...after a troubleshooting I took off the disconnect and put it back on - due to the socket wrench I couldn't see that I was tightening the nut down onto an off center poppet... poppet is now bent and unusable and the flange of my liquid dip tube is bent as well luckily I was able to use another kegs poppet...but what a pain

Haven't had that one, I always do a 3 step cleaning on kegs because they get nasty inside.

I once was cleaning kegs (1/2bbl size) and turned on the tap water to rinse them out. Stepped outside for a minute which turned into 5 and when I came back the keg pressure was at 80psi, this was shortly after the Redhook incident and I think my heart skipped 3 beats as I shut down the water and hit the release.

I never leave kegs on the wash stand for even a minute without shutting things down and doublee checking that they are shut down.

Bought a keg from the LHBS a few weeks ago, used. I bought one there before and it was in OK shape, needed a good cleaning but not bad.

Opened this one up and there was about 6" of nasty rotten moldy old syrup in the bottom of it. Obviously no attempt to even dump it out by the HBS. I let it soak in Oxy for a few days and scrubbed the hell out of it. Its fine now. I will be buying my next keg from the other store in town that cleans and pressure tests for the same price (learned that after the fact!).