4 kegs, one faucet

[boekman]

I am nearly finished with a 4 tap Keezer. Just before purchasing 4 shanks and faucets I had this thought: what if the liquid lines went into a crazy 5 way valve like this:

then one very short line would go from the valve to a single beer faucet. You could select the beer of choice and pour away. I could live with a tiny bit of the last beer clearing through the line. I know that the picture has the liquid traveling the opposite way of what I had in mind, but I'm thinking it could work in reverse as long as there were no check valves.

This would be sort of fun/original and possibly save me the expense of 3 additional faucet setups.

Has this been done before? What could possibly go wrong? Also, is there a better way to search for a valve like this? I'm not sure what to call it.

 

[55x11]

I am nearly finished with a 4 tap Keezer. Just before purchasing 4 shanks and faucets I had this thought: what if the liquid lines went into a crazy 5 way valve like this:

then one very short line would go from the valve to a single beer faucet. You could select the beer of choice and pour away. I could live with a tiny bit of the last beer clearing through the line. I know that the picture has the liquid traveling the opposite way of what I had in mind, but I'm thinking it could work in reverse as long as there were no check valves.

This would be sort of fun/original and possibly save me the expense of 3 additional faucet setups.

Has this been done before? What could possibly go wrong? Also, is there a better way to search for a valve like this? I'm not sure what to call it.

Every time you switch you will have a part of a pint of the previous beer in your current beer. So if you switch from say Imperial Stout to IPA, you will get lets say 1/4 stout in your IPA. Some flavors will linger quite a bit since you are using the same lines.

Finally, if one beer develops an infection or some other off-flavor, you are likely to infect all your kegs since you don't have dedicated lines for each tap.

 

[day_trippr]

I think it'd take an extraordinary set of limiting circumstances to have this make sense, but, fwiw, this 5-way can be had with 3/16" ID ports all 'round.

No idea how many faucets one could buy instead but I'm betting it'd be a few...

Cheers!

 

[55x11]

Double post