Long beer line run - ideas?

Hi all,

I have just completed my temporary keg setup, and am force carbing my first keg.
So, now I am contemplating a permanent install.

The room in my basement that houses the keg fridge is directly underneath my kitchen. I was thinking that a beer tower on the island in the kitchen would be ideal. I am estimating that the beverage line that would have to be run would be about 20ft max.

So, the question is, what are the concerns/issues that would arise from a long beer line run? I would have to assume that one would be warm beer in the exposed beer line, but are there any others? Does anyone have any recommendations for making this possible? Any help would be greatly appriciated.

Cheers,

Rhino

Bigger hose would be needed to maintain a balanced system, so even more beer would be warm in the hose. Commercial establishments do it with long lines, but they deal commercial flow. You woud have a pitcher of warm beer to get a glass of cold stuff. Perhaps miove something from the kitchen to make room for the kegerator up stairs? Build it in to the island? Put the keg in the fridge, use a downstairs fridge to make up for it?

casebrew said:

Bigger hose would be needed to maintain a balanced system, so even more beer would be warm in the hose. Commercial establishments do it with long lines, but they deal commercial flow. You woud have a pitcher of warm beer to get a glass of cold stuff. Perhaps miove something from the kitchen to make room for the kegerator up stairs? Build it in to the island? Put the keg in the fridge, use a downstairs fridge to make up for it?

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Commercial establishments mostly use a glycol-cooled system that keeps the entire system, from the kegs to the taps, nice and temperature controlled. If you can afford to do this in your home, great, but most of us can't.

What you are going to get, if you try this without serious monetary investment in a dedicated cooling system for your beer line, is pitchers and glasses of nice foam.

My run is only about 4 feet into my ceramic draft tower on the bar I'm building. I bought some flexible two inch tubing and made a loop that ran from the fridge to the top of the tower and then back to the fridge. I had to cut two holes in the side of the fridge to do this and inserted pvc sleeves through the side to clamp the hose to (one could think of this as a loop extension of the fridge - a fridge hernia if you will). The two beer lines go through one sleeve into the 2" flexible tubing and to the tower. I put a small 12 V fan on the inside of the fridge end of the other pvc sleeve, blowing air into the fridge, so the coldest air is sucked in over the beer lines. The external tubing is insulated with 2" of styrofoam above, below, and on the sides.

So far it seems to work. It needs more testing though We had a party to celebrate the now recently functional draft tower and we went through two cornies of beer. I only had three days to see how well it kept the beer cold before I ran out of kegged beer. I need to finish the rest of the bar now (and keg up some more beer - hopefully in time for Thanksgiving). Getting it functional was the first priority

I'm not sure what the length limits are for an air cooled system. I assume it depends on how well you insulate the tubing and how powerfull a fan you use. Check out the Micromatic website. That is where I first got the idea on how I could cool my beer lines. I had been eyeing the draft tower but was resisting because I couldn't figure out how to keep the beer cold.

pjj2ba, that is absolutely brilliant. Thanks for the info. This should be absolutely doable. Now I just have to take some measurements, and figure out if I can place my beer fridge directly under my kitchen island. And then a trip to the hardware store

When/if I get it going, I'll post results, as I'm sure my run will be longer than 4'.

Cheers,

Rhino