Back in the saddle- Questions on gas/beer delivery

[BNC04]

I’ve been out of the homebrew hobby for several years now and sold my 5 tap keezer when I left.
Well, I’m back and getting ready to get started on a keezer build and have questions regarding gas delivery and beer dispensing.
Plan- 3 tap keezer which will supply qty. 2 -5 gallon corny home brews and a ¼ barrel of commercial or microbrew. These beers will consist, of wheats, browns, Kolsch, basic ales and every now and then a chocolate stout
I also plan to condition/carb another 5 Gallons of home brew in the keezer
I still have a dual body regulator and Sankey connection. And I’m trying to decide it is better to control the flow of each beer via individual pressures and regulator or via the Perlick spouts
Options-
Run the current dual regulator with a 3 way gas distribution block off one regulated port and Perlick control spouts on all 3 using the 2nd regulated port for high pressure carb/conditioning.
Run a triple regulator to a 2 way dist block with 2 Perlick control spouts, one line from a dedicated regulator with a standard Perlick spout and one line from a dedicated regulator for high pressure
Run a quad Regulator with a regulated line dedicated to each and standard Perlick spouts on all

Interested in your thoughts and opinions,
Thanks
Brett

 

[splendidus]

Conventional wisdom would say that you use the CO2 pressure to control the carbonation on your beers. So the number of regulators you want depends on the number of carbonation ranges you would like (e.g., you might want to serve your wheat beers at a higher carbonation than your other beers and thus want two different pressures).

Line/serving system resistance dictates how fast the beer is dispensed and thus how much foam the resulting pour has. One way to properly balance a serving system is use line length to provide the adequate resistance for a given pressure from the regulator (longer lines provide more resistance). Here is a good line length calculator where you enter some of the other parameters of your setup and the properly balanced line length is calculated. The downside of adding resistance through line length is that you can't easily add or remove line length if you want to change the type of beer you are serving on that tap. This might be ok if you always serve a wheat beer on tap 1 and your other beers on taps 2 and 3. You could also switch out lines (have your lines be connected with 1/4" MFL or John Guest connections) for different styles or have a modular line with connections. To avoid these solutions, you could use flow control faucets to add restriction rather than line length. In this way you can serve all beers at the proper serving pressure to maintain carbonation for that style and simply adjust the faucet setting every time you switch styles for a given tap.