How many @$&! kegs do I need?

[Trail]

I now have four kegs to go with four taps, and plan to have them all filled within the next three weeks. I felt all satisfied with myself... until I realized I'd need to keep my new draught lines clean.

Did a little googling and found a do-jigger for $48 that amounts to a tank with a ball lock fitting and a hand pump on it, for flushing lines. Great... cheaper than a keg, right?

Except a used ball lock keg can be as cheap as $59. Ten bucks more than this crappy little hand pump dealie, and I can store beer in it when I have a keg about to kick.

...Only now I need another keg so I always have one available for cleaning.

Long story short... how do I figure out how many kegs I actually need? Maybe the value of the $48 hand pump thing is never being tempted to serve beer from it...

 

[day_trippr]

I recommend at least two kegs per faucet, unless you brew 10 gallon batches, in which case a few more kegs will keep the pipeline running smoother.
I run 6 faucets and when I was doing five gallon batches 12 kegs was perfect, but after switching to 10 gallon batches I have found 16 kegs keeps the Tap list more diverse than 12...

Cheers!

 

[btbnl]

More.

 

[mongoose33]

I recommend at least two kegs per faucet, unless you brew 10 gallon batches, in which case a few more kegs will keep the pipeline running smoother.
I run 6 faucets and when I was doing five gallon batches 12 kegs was perfect, but after switching to 10 gallon batches I have found 16 kegs keeps the Tap list more diverse than 12...

Cheers!

That's a good number to aim for. I have....9 full size kegs and a single 1.5-gallon keg, and that's about right.

BTW, as far as cleaning goes.....take a look at this thread and see if it doesn't appeal to you better. I started with the pumper thing and it's sitting here gathering dust.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=629405

Try this thread; the second post shows how I do it. You need a couple of connectors to connect liquid line QDs together, and a pump, and some silicone tubing, but this is the nuts for me. None of this one-line-at-a-time stuff for me.

And you'll note it doesn't take a keg to do it. Though, FWIW, I have a spare keg filled with Star-San--it's always the next keg to be filled. I push the Star-San out of it into the next keg, leaving me an empty keg full of CO2, which is what I want to be racking into.

BTW, here's a terrible schematic of how it looks on paper, for five faucets:

 

[BrianGee]

Yep, get a $20 submersible pump from Amazon, a carb cap, some 1/2" tubing, and optionally 1 or 2 ball lock to ball lock jumper posts.

http://www.homebrewfinds.com/2012/11/recirculating-draft-line-cleaning-build.html

I do it a bit differently than he does - I pump up backwards through the faucet, connect the beer line to the carb cap, and just drop that into the bucket for returning, instead of rigging the carb cap to the pump side. My pump came with a 1/2" output barb so I just pushed the tubing right onto the output.

If you jumper 2 or 4 faucets together at the beer lines with 1 or 2 of these, it's even faster.
https://www.brewhardware.com/product_p/ball_lock_jumperpost.htm

 

[Trail]

This is an absolute wealth of cleaning advice... thank you so much, mongoose33 and BrianGee. Researching how a cleaning setup should actually work was my work for tonight, and you've saved me the trouble completely.


With respect to the number of kegs, 2x [number of taps] seems reasonable. Guess it's time to buy SWMBO some presents to improve my odds of survival on the day UPS drops the kegs off...

 

[mongoose33]

I forgot to include the link!

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=629405