Over carbed beer - need help...

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Marsdude

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Jan 22, 2010
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Location
Fort Collins, CO
The good news is that my first AG brew turned out well.

The bad news is that my first attempt at kegging this brew didn't go so well.

I will not go into the details but in my attempt to force carb I over carbonated the beer. All I get when I try to dispense is foam. I have the keg set at about 7 psi now. Is there anything I can do or am I just stuck with my noob mistake?
 
What temperature do you have its stored and what size/length is your beer line?
 
I was fighting the same issue....and my three keg to tap beer lines were 1/4", all varying lengths from 3' to 5'. I just swapped all three lines out to 3/16", 10' and I now get a perfect pour....8 bucks in tube and Im happy now!
 
I think 3/16" ID is 7/16" OD (the wall thickness of the normal beverage line is 1/8") so i think he is good there. If on the other hand he is using cheep vinyl line from the hardware store then yes the ID could be much too large.

Marsdude, Assuming the beer is indeed overcarbed bleed off pressure from the keg a couple time a day and it will settle down eventually. You could speed the process up by shaking it but I view shaking beer on par with shaking a baby, abusing either is bad OK.

Some other things that can cause foaming:

  1. Too short of a hose
  2. Not opening the faucet all the way.
  3. Poor quality control on the disconnect, one of our members found one recently that had a burr of plastic on the interior of the disconnect that should have been trimmed off at the factory but wasn't. It caused turbulence that made co2 come out of suspension as the beer was dispensed.
 
I recently went from 5ft 3/16" ID to 10ft on one of the taps... huge difference. Much better flow and a ton less foam. The other tap is still at 5ft and you can definitely tell which is which when you pour.
 
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