What happened to my Guinness Clone?

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dan46nbrew

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I just kegged my first Guinness clone and hooked it up to a blender with 25% CO2 and 75% nitrogen at around 30lbs. The first glass I poured was perfect, had the cascade and nice creamy head, tasted great too, this was about 5 minutes after hooking up to gas. So I try one more glass and all is fine. One of my friends is coming over and about 10 minutes later I pour another glass as he is coming in. It was completely flat, no cascade, no head. I don't understand what happened. First I don't understand how I got the effect after immediately hooking it up then it goes away in 15 minutes or so. Can anyone explain what happened?
 
Expanding gas coming out of the tanks gets pretty cold. Maybe something froze up. See how it's doing after an hour of not trying to use it. If it's better, then you need to hunt for where it's freezing up and figure out how to solve that.

Just a wild guess though. I've used pressurized gasses for other things, but not specifically for beer. In cobbled together plumbing, freeze ups happened.
 
Expanding gas coming out of the tanks gets pretty cold. Maybe something froze up. See how it's doing after an hour of not trying to use it. If it's better, then you need to hunt for where it's freezing up and figure out how to solve that.

Just a wild guess though. I've used pressurized gasses for other things, but not specifically for beer. In cobbled together plumbing, freeze ups happened.

The kegerator is set to around 37F... if something froze wouldn't the beer be blocked from being poured? Maybe the diffusion plate on the tap got gunked up... ill try cleaning it see if that helps and try leaving it alone for awhile if its a freezing issue. It's still strange that I could get the nitrogen in the keg so fast in like 5 minutes...
 
I think I know what happened. After doing some reading about nitro setups I found out the nitrogen doesn't get dissolved in the beer its used to dissipate the CO2 out to create the creamy head Guinness is known for. The beer didn't have time to absorb the CO2 in 5 minutes after being hooked up to gas so it may have had some low levels of carbonation out of the fermenter. Thats the best explanation I can come up with.
 
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