Foamy pours from Sankey

[kvgros]

I've relatively new to kegging and have a decent new setup with 4 kegs on tap. My first 2-3 tapped kegs were home brews from Corny ball-lock kegs. I spent a lot of time on here getting ideas for my bar build-out and was pretty selective about equipment, etc. Those kegs poured great, I have a chilled tap box that keeps the beer lines cold right to the taps (~32-35 degrees) and I had great success. As I wanted to add some commercial kegs to my setup I bought some Sankey taps and ball lock conversions. This setup was handy and allowed me to buy 1/6 kegs from my local liquor store and slap one of my Sankey taps on them and plug them right into my system. All of this has been completed in the last few weeks and now I'm down to tweaking the system and learning it's quirks.

Here is the issue:

My home-brews pour great from their Corny kegs and I'm very happy with the perfect amount of head. This goes for multiple types of beer (I've got an NB IPA, a Morebeer Pliny Clone double IPA, and a Brewers Best Kolsch all on tap). The 2 commercial kegs I've used thus far (Schlafly Pale Ale and a Blue Moon) are EXTREMELY foamy and all I get is foam for the first 3-4 seconds of any poor. This makes these kegs almost unusable.

I've tried adjusting the pressure on these kegs (anywhere from 2psi to 12psi), bleeding the CO2 off the keg with the worry it was over carbonated. I've unhooked everything and cleaned the lines between the keg and the taps. I've removed the Sankey taps and verified everything is sealed and tight. I haven't lost any pressure in my system (ran by a 20# tank) so I'm pretty sure I don't have a leak (I've had these kegs tapped for 2 weeks now) I've even switched the lines between these kegs and other kegs to see if it's something from point A to point B. Unfortunately I can't seem to do anything that has any effect on these kegs...it's foam foam foam.

Is there something different you have to do with Sankey taps or commercial kegs? Those of you that have these setups: Anything you learned in using commercial kegs that you had to account for when tapping them into your setups?

Thanks for any help you can give,

-Kevin

 

[wilserbrewer]

Only thing I can guess is that running through the corny to sanke adapter hardware is kicking some of the carbonation out of solution? Seems like you have pretty much got it covered otherwise.

 

[PapaO]

You need to know the volumes of CO2 they were carbed at. Use this chart with your temp to set psi http://www.kegerators.com/carbonation-table.php . Blue moon is carbed to 2.75 so at 38 your psi would be 14. As far as the Schlafly Pale Ale you could E-Mail them.

 

[ArcaneXor]

How long are your beer lines?

 

[smizak]

Huh..I did a fundraiser in Nov. with 3 Sankey kegs, set the gas to 2-3PSI, 5' 3/16" lines with cobra taps, poured beautifully.

 

[kvgros]

Just extended one of the beer lines from about 4.5' to 7' as I found two calculators that gave different results for the same question: Beer line length. Going with the longer one and trying it now with the Blue Moon.