Manifold Upgrade

Now that we have a pipeline going with enough beer and kegs, it was time to upgrade our manifold a bit. When we got the kegerator, we planned on 3 taps, so we bought a manifold with 3 valves to carbonate/dispense each tap (the 3 red gas lines in the picture above). Now that we want to have beer “on deck” and carbonating while not on tap, we need to expand our gas line options.

Ideal world: buy in-line regulators. In-line regulators are regulators in series, that that as you go down the line, you can decrease the PSI and have each tap at a unique carbonation. This would be ideal as we brew a wide variety of beers and English, American, and Belgian beers all have subtle differences in recommended carbonation levels. Unfortunately, these are not cheap, so we’ll wait on that for a while.

Manifold options:

1.       Buy a new, larger manifold: We could upgrade to a 5-port manifold to have everything we would need, but again, this would require another $70, and then what do we do with the old one?

2.       Add a Y-site: This will turn 1 port into 2, and will only cost about $20 with the fitting and the new check valve that we’ll need. They’ll both be at the same pressure, but so is everything else right now, so it wouldn’t be different than what we are doing now.  

If anyone’s read this blog before, you know that here at Rowdy Reptile, we do things on the cheap; so we went with the Y-site. It was a lot harder to assemble than I imagined only because the old valves were next to impossible to unscrew. I tried different things over of the course of a few days without any success. Eventually, I bought a small $4 vise from Lowes and was able to clamp the manifold down to a counter in the garage. Only then was I able to unscrew one of the valves to add the y-site. Once assembled, the only issues is the tight spaces between the valves. As you can see, the y-site is perpendicular to the other valves to allow enough space for the actual tubing. 

Thankfully, it's up and running now, but as you would guess, we aren't using all the lines just yet. Since the Black IPA was ready I swapped that out for the Dubbel. Hoppy beers are best fresh, so I wanted to get that up and running as soon as possible. As I think the Dubbel could use a little more time to age, I took that out of the fridge for now and will let it age until we need it again in the garage.

Next posts will be some more tasting notes, then hopefully we'll squeeze in another brew in a couple-few weeks. 

#TeamDietrich