Keg King Malt Muncher 3 Frustrations

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I am familiar with grey market from other hobbies. It's always risky. Save now? Pay later?

However, I do know there are different lines/quality of a product. I've read, whether true or not, Keg King mills are a knock off/cheaper version of the Monster Mill. While it's possible both mills are made in the same Chinese prison factory, Monster Mill may have higher standards (specs, QA, etc) for their mills, hence the higher cost. Perhaps Keg King specs/QA are not as demanding, hence the lower cost than Monster Mill. I am only speculating as I really don't know.

I do know many brands have different, although nearly the same, items available to target different segments of the market. For example, a dishwasher manufacturer and/or seller may have a noisy model that's low in price targeted to a younger crowd looking to save money. The same dishwasher with better sound proofing, dB rating, costs more and is targeted at an older crowd whom wants the low noise and can afford the higher cost.
 
True, I stand corrected and apologize. But The ceo of keg king is being misleading in stating your product is an inferior knock off when in reality it likely came from the same pile that was made for distribution to an Australian keg king customer but instead found its way to you possibly when keg king stopped distributing them itself and left the manufacturer with extras already branded, who knows. these could have gotten slipped in with newer otherwise branded stock they now sell.
I agree morebeer should step in and make it right since keg king doesn't support US customers that obtained their products through gray market or back channels and its unfair to ask them to support a product they never sold. Years ago when I worked as a xerox tech, we ran into a similar problem with xerox branded toner cartridges that were made by a company called rank in India for xerox overseas finding their way into our US market and much lower prices. Xerox had a hell of a time figuring out how to address the situation since it was geniune xerox toner, just not for this side of the world where they had a different company making, packaging and branding it. In this case you have the same product from the same manufacturer that presumably found its way where it shouldnt have due to mismanagment / control or fraud within the original keg king company where an employee or employees at the time legally filed the paperwork to distribute these products in other regions with said branding but whithout others in the company somehow knowing for years..
I don’t think I misled anyone. The stuff we sell we stand behind. When others sell it by putting our name on there without our knowledge and permission then its nothing to do with us. We do our own QC before our name goes on. If other people copy our logo and name then that is skullduggery and the people selling it know it is not a Keg King product. That makes it counterfeit in my book and we cannot be blamed for it not working or breaking. No past employee was ever granted any right to break the law by filing such paperwork and doing that is breaking Australian law.
 
Thats where your mistaken, They are ALL THE SAME CHINESE MILL keg king just resold that same chinese mill along with everyone else! they all order them from the same supplier in china with custom etching on the side now. (I used to have the link to the actual supplier doing this but cant find it) The issue here is due to a split in the company you have one part that changed to kegland and the other side that wont honor any of (thier genuine products) that were sold to the US market previously by the people that left leg king and formed kegland. Basically you are getting the short end of the stick as far as support because of a former dispute at keg king and the results. im not sure where kegking.cn fits into all this but I know that it likely has something to do with the same former kegking.au employees that left and now work for kegland if in fact that story which was told by Will in the intertap thread is correct, Which is why I say there more to this whole thing than whats been shared in this thread.

These companies like keg king dont actually make most of thier own products if any...
If you dont believe me heres the NEW keg king mill avaliable on alibaba for 70-100 each depending on order volume made by Vulcan.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-det...spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.0.0.3f957503UAuqBKKegland is moving on to thier new Maltzilla mill so it looks like the "maltmuncher" mill is now being marketed under that term by multiple distributors without the kegland or keg king branding if you look at williams brewing Maltmuncher Three Roller Mill and amazon sellers like this Homebrewers Outpost - MILL710 MaltMuncher 3 Roller Grain Mill:Amazon

This is the same thing thats happened with multiple chinese items that kegking used to sell as thier own like thier original intertap faucets which they no longer sell but you can still buy from other places like kegland...
Well that is a load of cock and bull. We actually have our own factory which makes over 30% of what we sell. We also have a pretty serious design centre staffed by some good engineers who love to brew. We still manufacture the Intertap and own the patent manufacturing rights to its design. Our later Ultra Tap which is a vast improvement on the Intertap is now sold exclusively by MicroMatic in the USA. Happy to provide you proof so that you can stop making all this rubbish up.
 
I don’t think I misled anyone. The stuff we sell we stand behind. When others sell it by putting our name on there without our knowledge and permission then its nothing to do with us. We do our own QC before our name goes on. If other people copy our logo and name then that is skullduggery and the people selling it know it is not a Keg King product. That makes it counterfeit in my book and we cannot be blamed for it not working or breaking. No past employee was ever granted any right to break the law by filing such paperwork and doing that is breaking Australian law.
Have these x employees been prosecuted/sued?
 
Well that is a load of cock and bull. We actually have our own factory which makes over 30% of what we sell. We also have a pretty serious design centre staffed by some good engineers who love to brew. We still manufacture the Intertap and own the patent manufacturing rights to its design. Our later Ultra Tap which is a vast improvement on the Intertap is now sold exclusively by MicroMatic in the USA. Happy to provide you proof so that you can stop making all this rubbish up.

I think you have a legitimate complaint about your brand being under your control, and you have every right to push back on this. I am glad you let us know this was happening. Caveat emptor and all that.

Where does the other 70% come from? I am assuming that the answer is China.

You said 70% of what you SELL, but you never said what percentage of those MILLS are made in Australia, and if I had to guess . . . Well . . . Better not.

The claim that Kegco, Kegland, Cereal Killer, KegKing mills are all made on the same assembly line in the same factory with the same QC (why would a factory have multiple protocols?) seems like something you would want to cast doubt on. That said I don't see anything you have said thus-far to persuade me otherwise.
 
Well that is a load of cock and bull. We actually have our own factory which makes over 30% of what we sell. We also have a pretty serious design centre staffed by some good engineers who love to brew. We still manufacture the Intertap and own the patent manufacturing rights to its design. Our later Ultra Tap which is a vast improvement on the Intertap is now sold exclusively by MicroMatic in the USA. Happy to provide you proof so that you can stop making all this rubbish up.
so your saying your new mill is not the chinese made mill I linked above? I have purchased multiple keg king products on aliexpress including the intertap faucets and a beergun and both came in kegking.au packaging the beergun even came with a full direction booklet. I Do not believe for a second these were fake copies like your intentionally misleading people to believe. You want people to believe the manufacturers go through the added headache of having different grades or designed parts for these mills or product when in fact the odds are much more likely they are all assembled from the same bins of parts short of whether stainless or hardened rollers are selected and the laser etching and packaging. Sorry I just dont buy it. Now there may be factory second no name stuff being sold out there sure. But I just dont buy that the mills you had purchased were superior than all the other distributors buying them with thier own branding here.
Are these mot your directions that came with your beer guns a few years back? I've bought a lot of chinese products and enough knock offs to tell when the packaging is real or cheap faked knock off packaging..for one thing it would have been most likely black and white photocopied directions and not on semigloss paper had this product been a fake counterfeit knock off.
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Have these x employees been prosecuted/sued?
This is a very good question.. and one area where I bet things are a bit more cloudy than stated.. my guess is at least one of these x employees had some sort of stake in the original company and they distributed products legally whether ethically and properly through the company channels or not. Otherwise I think you would not see kegland in operation right now.
 
I am familiar with grey market from other hobbies. It's always risky. Save now? Pay later?

However, I do know there are different lines/quality of a product. I've read, whether true or not, Keg King mills are a knock off/cheaper version of the Monster Mill. While it's possible both mills are made in the same Chinese prison factory, Monster Mill may have higher standards (specs, QA, etc) for their mills, hence the higher cost. Perhaps Keg King specs/QA are not as demanding, hence the lower cost than Monster Mill. I am only speculating as I really don't know.

I do know many brands have different, although nearly the same, items available to target different segments of the market. For example, a dishwasher manufacturer and/or seller may have a noisy model that's low in price targeted to a younger crowd looking to save money. The same dishwasher with better sound proofing, dB rating, costs more and is targeted at an older crowd whom wants the low noise and can afford the higher cost.
In this case the knock offs are superior in engineering than the monster mills they copied just as the monster mills are superior to the barley crushers they copied with better rollers. The comparable monster mills use cheap inexpensive bronze bushings and only use real bearings like the "clones do" in thier upgraded models selling for multiple times the price.
 
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so your saying your new mill is not the chinese made mill I linked above? I have purchased multiple keg king products on aliexpress including the intertap faucets and a beergun and both came in kegking.au packaging the beergun even came with a full direction booklet. I Do not believe for a second these were fake copies like your intentionally misleading people to believe. You want people to believe the manufacturers go through the added headache of having different grades or designed parts for these mills or product when in fact the odds are much more likely they are all assembled from the same bins of parts short of whether stainless or hardened rollers are selected and the laser etching and packaging. Sorry I just dont buy it. Now there may be factory second no name stuff being sold out there sure. But I just dont buy that the mills you had purchased were superior than all the other distributors buying them with thier own branding here.
Are these mot your directions that came with your beer guns a few years back? I've bought a lot of chinese products and enough knock offs to tell when the packaging is real or cheap faked knock off packaging..for one thing it would have been most likely black and white photocopied directions and not on semigloss paper had this product been a fake counterfeit knock off.View attachment 689389
This was done via the Chinese business called AMCO Technologies which is a PO Box in Hong Kong. They were using our letterhead and even our business number with invoices coming out of Hong Kong and China. The real Keg King in Australia only found this was being done after October 2017. American businesses were advised that they were not dealing with us but these setups in Hong Kong and China that were using our names and more without our permission or agreement. Keg King has never sold anything through Ali Baba or any other on-line business than its own.
 
This is a very good question.. and one area where I bet things are a bit more cloudy than stated.. my guess is at least one of these x employees had some sort of stake in the original company and they distributed products legally whether ethically and properly through the company channels or not. Otherwise I think you would not see kegland in operation right now.
No they did not do this legally. They simply took our names etc to China. We were shocked to find a so called “Distribution Centre“ in Shanghai bearing our Keg King name.
 
No they did not do this legally. They simply took our names etc to China. We were shocked to find a so called “Distribution Centre“ in Shanghai bearing our Keg King name.

So what you are saying specifically is that they took your Australia manufactured product and reverse engineered it in China? You're haven't had any of these products contract manufactured in China? Or you did have some percentage of your product contract manufactured there?
 
This was done via the Chinese business called AMCO Technologies which is a PO Box in Hong Kong. They were using our letterhead and even our business number with invoices coming out of Hong Kong and China. The real Keg King in Australia only found this was being done after October 2017. American businesses were advised that they were not dealing with us but these setups in Hong Kong and China that were using our names and more without our permission or agreement. Keg King has never sold anything through Ali Baba or any other on-line business than its own.
What about the story I first heard from you blaming this on a rouge employee? And im not suggesting YOU sold stuff on alibaba... only that your in some cases, buying generic products that are already being sold there like your new mill which is why why I provided the link to the distributor.
 
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We have and have had products manufactured in China. They were at the time for sales in Australia. They were not to be sold elsewhere without our agreement or permission. However the Chinese business there which was sourcing our products then started to sell some product without our knowledge and used our names, letterheads, business numbers to basically pretend they were us.
again the story I heard in the intertap thread was that this was because of a kegking employee that did this behind your back?
 
These days we have much tighter arrangements but I find that a lot of distributors in western countries are very eager to get equipment and not give a fig about the origin. So its not just the Chinese entities doing the wrong thing I am sad to say.

I totally get the out-sourcing arrangements and what-not, but are you telling me that you have absolutely no recourse in the USA because your company is HQ'd in Australia? I am not a huge NB fan and prefer to support smaller business, but I do like morebeer and find it hard to believe that they would continue to support counterfeit products. What legal avenues have you pursued (cease and desist orders, etc)?
 
I totally get the out-sourcing arrangements and what-not, but are you telling me that you have absolutely no recourse in the USA because your company is HQ'd in Australia? I am not a huge NB fan and prefer to support smaller business, but I do like morebeer and find it hard to believe that they would continue to support counterfeit products. What legal avenues have you pursued (cease and desist orders, etc)?
Again, It would seem theres more to this story than whats been told in this thread.. Especially since its not the same story I heard in the intertap thread which made me question it in the first place.
 
We have and have had products manufactured in China. They were at the time for sales in Australia. They were not to be sold elsewhere without our agreement or permission. However the Chinese business there which was sourcing our products then started to sell some product without our knowledge and used our names, letterheads, business numbers to basically pretend they were us.
This has been done many times before... Back when vizio was still v inc and before they sourced bigger companies like sharp and LG to make thier products for them with cheaper shortcuts designed into the components than their own. I bought a bravo D1 dvd player on newegg that normally sold for about 300 dollars back in the day for under $100. I didnt know I bought it direct from the manufacturer... In that case it seems they caught on that what they were making supporting and packaging and for pennies on the dollar was worth way more than they were getting so they apparently said hell with the middle man and sold direct stealing the companies branding in the process... It wasnt right ethically but neither was what the middleman marketing company was doing. In that case V inc ended up not supporting anyone who bought them and left thier own legit customers hanging in the wind.. I can only hope this kind of thing will someday convince companies to develop and make their own products again like it used to be. In this case though all the products in question I mentioned like the mill, taps and beergun were all knockoff clones already of someone elses design work and products like monster mill, and blichmann so... In fact the intertap taps werent allowed to be sold in the US for a while until the patent holder in the states got royalties if I remember right.
Now days I am a lot more knowledgeable on the electronics since I repair them for a hobby and let me tell you, if you shop by branding the jokes on you because most of the time its all a shell game unless its a really unique product.

In this case though, with SO many kegking product being sold by so many vendors and it going on for so long, there has to be more involved to the story than companies like williams brewing and morebeer just deciding to pick up "counterfiet" product through a third party and not the reseller whos name is on them. I think whomever it was that you blamed the intertap mess on that went to kegland had signed some sort of legal agreement to do or allow this and therefore its not the same scenerio as being implied in this thread.
 
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These days we have much tighter arrangements but I find that a lot of distributors in western countries are very eager to get equipment and not give a fig about the origin. So its not just the Chinese entities doing the wrong thing I am sad to say.
This I also agree with 100% again the only way around such games is to buy a unique product from the company who designed and built it proudly. unfortunately the consumer also has to be in a finacial postion to be more picky and knowlegeable about what they are buying and it doesnt help when thier so many cases with so many items where they are generic and rebranded and marketed by different companies at different prices... it makes one Jaded to the real thing. if you buy a cheaper "Sharp" tv for example, there isnt any Sharp components in it and it could very well be some cheap chinese Hisense or the like tv that you just paid extra for the false branding.
 
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I totally get the out-sourcing arrangements and what-not, but are you telling me that you have absolutely no recourse in the USA because your company is HQ'd in Australia? I am not a huge NB fan and prefer to support smaller business, but I do like morebeer and find it hard to believe that they would continue to support counterfeit products. What legal avenues have you pursued (cease and desist orders, etc)?

NB is no longer owned by InBev.
 
We need a decent, dependable, adjustable, geared malt mill for the homebrewers without it costing $899 or more.
Do we though? I myself have no issues with the 2 non geared chinese mills including the kegco 3 roller that I own. I mill enough grain to brew 112 gallons of beer with it every week for over a year and a half and its never given me ANY issues. I think you might just have a defective mill. There are many people using this mill with no issues.
 
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Would be happy to supply but the freight will kill it. Just hope we can get a distributor with some national clout willing to stock our stuff and then we could make a lot of home brewers happy with our kit and our service. In Europe its been easy but in in the US it seems that the bigger distributors just want cheap out of China and they seem to have a stranglehold.

Have all major homebrew suppliers in the US been contacted about carrying? If so, what about 2nd tier of homebrew suppliers?
 
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Do we though? I myself have no issues with the 2 non geared chinese mills including the kegco 3 roller that I own. I mill enough grain to brew 112 gallons of beer with it every week for over a year and a half and its never given me ANY issues. I think you might just have a defective mill. There are many people using this mill with no issues.

Yes we do!. Great for you having no issues. Doesn't apply to others. If available, I'd purchase a geared mill straight away.
 
Yes we do!. Great for you having no issues. Doesn't apply to others. If available, I'd purchase a geared mill straight away.
I think everyone else who commented here is not having this issue so what "others"... The others including myself who commented here seem to be content with thier non geared mills is what I was getting at.
Seriously though,
My point was there are thousands of homebrewers using the mills that have already been avaliable for years without issues not just myself which means any fault preventing one of these from would have to be defective mill or mill setup or application related not design.

I had a wheelbarrow that the tire would not hold air this spring... kept going flat on me. Tried fix a flat tire slime ect... My solution,- rather than going to a solid tire, was to replace the leaking tire and rim and no issues so far for the rest of the summer and no tradeoffs of a solid tire.
 
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I realize, probably, nearly all our brewing equipment is made in Chinese prison factories. However, I do know from other hobbies, there are different quality control measures required/contracted by different sellers of the Chinese "junk".

Just about any brewing item, based on what I've searched, are available at Alibaba.
 
You are right there is plenty of enthusiasm from home brewers and for our party we would be delighted to be able to do more for them. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t get enquiries about our high quality PET fermenters and more. However until we can find US businesses who are willing to take on the distribution its a bit hard especially in the current situation. From what we see home brewers in the US are paying quite high prices for often rather poor quality goods. The companies who dominate your home brewing market are doing well for themselves so they don’t feel the need to change or add anything new. This might change as the trade war between the US and China keeps ramping up. We would love to hear from brewers in the US who might know of more companies willing to offer our products. Maybe someone out there could start a home brewers co-op to do bulk buys of our gear and we would certainly help with that. In the meantime the Beverage People in California have started to offer some of our products and we will support them strongly wherever we can.

Hi, I’m re opening this thread since I just read it and I’m concerned. I just bought the Malt Muncher 3 from Amazon, sold by Amazon. Is it the real one? I mean, if it’s going to mean problems, I might just cancel the order...
 
Hi, I’m re opening this thread since I just read it and I’m concerned. I just bought the Malt Muncher 3 from Amazon, sold by Amazon. Is it the real one? I mean, if it’s going to mean problems, I might just cancel the order...

If it is the Malt Muncher 3 sold by Homebrewer's Outpost, it should be the same as the ones sold by MoreBeer, as HO is MB in disguise. I have that one and has performed well for me for the last year and a half.
 
Hi all,

The nice people from US Customs might have thought that the MM3 was a threat, so they took it out of my luggage and stripped it. Besides de terrible aesthetic damage, now I need to set it up from scratch.

Any tutorials or pointers on how to put it together? Thanks everyone.

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