Sanke keg foaming issues

[str1p3s]

My friends and I get a keg for a week at the beach. We have a kegerator and we always have foam issues. The keg is transported less than a mile to our beach house and put straight into the kegerator. We tap it and set the keg to serving pressure, around 12 psi. We're not sure what else the issue could be. We battle a very foamy pour all week long. The beer line is 6 ft, 3/8". Any suggestions of what we can try?

 

[bigdaddybrew]

Try turning down the pressure. Sometimes a slower pour can help.

 

[maazak]

What temperature is the kegerator set to ? Do you have a thermometer ? How cold is he beer in your glass ? Is it your kegerator ? I'd either lengthen the beer line to ten feet and/or switch the faucet to a flow control model.

 

[bigdaddybrew]

I just realized you mentioned 3/8 tubing..too big. You need about 12 feet of 3/16 tubing for a 12 psi pour.

 

[makisupapolice14]

Without an accurate liquid temp everyone will be speculating there's more to it than pressure.

1. Order a calibrated thermometer (does it read 32f in ice?)
2. Pour beer into room temp glass, dump/chug, and pour again into said glass.
3. Measure temp. Ideally you want to be 38-40f. Much higher and you may be constantly battling foam no matter what you do.
4. Contact the brewery and ask them how many volumes of co2 the beer was kegged at.
5. Use that value and this handy dandy chart to determine what psi to set your regulator at:
http://www.kegerators.com/carbonation-table.php

As others stated you need to use line with a narrower internal diameter. I have an old
Commercial bev air that has 6ft of 3/16 line and usually pours 37-39f depending on my setting and get reproducible perfect pours.

Lastly, are your lines clean? Beer stone/nasty lines further aggravate the foam issue. Without a tower chiller you will also get first pour foam due to temp in the tower line being warmer than in the box

 

[makisupapolice14]

View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1466366585.352087.jpg

Hopefully this is what your pours look like after some tweaking.....My all centennial IPA

 

[doug293cz]

I just realized you mentioned 3/8 tubing..too big. You need about 12 feet of 3/16 tubing for a 12 psi pour.

^^ This ^^

Brew on

 

[str1p3s]

Thanks for the replies folks. I'm pretty sure I was wrong (sue me, I was drunk!) about the ID of the beer line. I think it was 1/4" but we couldn't know for sure without cutting the line and we didn't have the tools to do so and reconnect everything.

We let it continue to chill overnight and settle from the trip to the kegerator and reduced the pressure to around 6 psi and it poured better. We still needed to blast off a little bit of foam into another glass before continuing in our actual glass to get a perfect pour though. My guess is the line is too short, although I never measured it. I think the problem in previous years was a dirty line. It sounded like my friend wasn't very good at cleaning it and he gave it a good cleaning before we left hoping that was the problem. I think he's going to replace the line and get a longer one with 3/16" ID going forward.

Again, thanks for the replies!