Flushing a jockey box while camping

[jgalak]

I am planning on switching to kegging soon, so doing some planning. One of my primary goals in homebrewing is bringing beer to camping events, where there is no electricity. A jockey box is the obvious solution for making sure the beer is cold.

My concern is with keeping it clean. It gets hot, and I'm not serving 24-7, mostly in the evenings. I don't want stuff getting funky in the jockey box tubing. So here's what I had in mind:

Get two spare kegs. Fill one with a PBW solution, fill the other with clean water. When done serving for the night, use CO2 to push pbw through the system, let it sit for 30 min, then use the clean keg to flush the system out.

Thoughts? Problems I'm missing? Would this work?

Thanks.

 

[flars]

I would just flush the lines with clean water and sanitize. PBW in a keg long term may cause a new set of problems with residue.

 

[MagicMatt]

Unless you're camping out for more than a week, there's no need to clean the lines every night. The jockey box should hold ice for at least 2 or 3 days (I'm sure you'll need to top up every so often), so there should be little change in temps of the beer in the lines. Just leave everything hooked up overnight and top up with fresh ice in the morning.

If you were to try and clean the lines every evening, you'd have to remove all of the ice and let the cold plate (or SS coils) warm up enough so that when you ran PBW or water through it that it will not freeze. This is way more trouble than you want, trust me.

As long as you leave the beer lines hooked up and under pressure, there will be little reason to clean the lines within 7 days time.

 

[jgalak]

The major camping event I am concerned with is 1-2 weeks (depending on how long I can take off from work). This year it'll be 12 days.

But I wasn't thinking it terms of cold - keeping it on ice the whole time isn't a problem (there's ice available at the campground). So yeah, with the lines staying cold it probably isn't as big a deal as I was thinking....