Lockboy,
What's your secret to using the tap-a-draft? I bought two setups a couple of years ago - completely untested, of course - and never got them to work properly. Ended up using probably a total of 6 gal of flat porter/amber to boil brats in. Tasted good, but one helluva waste of homebrew - and I cannot tell you the grief I've gotten from SWMBO over that escapade.
Here's what I did at botteling:
1) standard priming for 5 gal batch
2) filled TAD bottles using screw-on caps for all but one bottle
3) attached/screwed-on despensing rig to one bottle
4) attached 2 CO2 cartridges
Two weeks later (the min time I usually allow for conditioning and natural carbonation), I had flat, stale tasting beer. I figured there was a slow leak somewhere in the setup although I wasn't leaving beer and could hear no gas eascaping. I tried connecting one of the other bottles (the bottle-carbonated ones) to the despencer. This time, I could get it to dispense at a pretty slow rate and could never get all of the beer out of the bottle before it would go flat. At this point, the beer didn't taste stale like before, but I couldn't keep it carbonated beyond the first couple of days.
Anyway, what do you do that seems to make it work for you. I've recently begun kegging in the 5-gal cornies, so I'm probably not going back to the T-A-D, but it would be nice to get SWMBO off my back about it. I could maybe sell them to someone else, but only if I knew that they worked properly.
Thanks!
Focus