Kegerator service in Boston

Sometimes I think all the beer drinking slows down my thought process

 

To really drop the CO2 saturation level you need to shake and vent a number of times. Leave the CO2 off. Shake and vent over the course of a few hours. How long after you adjusted the dial did you take the temp?

 

It's your kegerators. It's bad. It's not good. You are rebuilding it piece by piece. And it might never work right. Because it's a cheap POS. Sorry, it just is.
Cheers.
Way back on January 3 this guy said...

 

Don't give up hope on things yet. Many of us have gotten our POS kegerators to work sufficiently. Sometimes they work through dumb luck and sometimes you do everything right and it doesn't work. My brother in law's kegerator is a disaster, billandsudz would probably cry if he saw it but my brother in law is happy with it. His first pour is foamy but subsequent ones aren't and he's ok with that. I looked at it and he has a remote tower with no cooling from the fridge unit to the tower! Just a bare beer line sitting in open air!

Honestly my system works by dumb luck as well so I can't talk either. I don't have a tower fan and I don't have a long enough beer line (I cheat by using a flow control faucet, I'll address that issue some day but for now it works for me). You've done much more right than me and still get foam. The main thing is to do small, single changes and wait on doing anything else until the system settles down. Changing the temperature takes a long time to get the temp to settle. Changing the CO2 takes a long time to settle. Do things patiently.

 

Glad to hear things are going well! Wish I was downtown for the Pat's parade today.

I've spent a lot of time looking into keg options in the MA area so if you have any questions about availability and cost feel free to ask. Prices of easy to get beer like Harpoon IPA can vary greatly. If you want beer from larger breweries find a larger liquor store. Their prices will be much lower. If you want smaller local craft beer then prices aren't always higher at smaller places and sometimes the more craft oriented bottle shops (like Craft Beer Cellar) will have better access. The smaller places are also easier to spend time with finding a good choice and asking their vendors. The larger places usually have a list of what they offer and anything outside of that takes a while for them to go back and forth with their distributors. Just don't go to someplace like Craft Beer Cellar for something like Harpoon or Sam Adams. The deals the larger liquor stores get on those types of kegs can't be touched by CBC.

 

Email or contact the brewery for Vols of co2 or search the micromatic forum beer carbonation levels thread

 

For the most part you shouldn't need to mess with your CO2 and temperature from keg to keg. Once you've got it set your are good to go, especially if you are going from an IPA to another IPA.

Now as for Bissell Brothers, they don't distribute to MA. They self distributed until the end of last year and they should have enough demand to not expand past Maine for a long while I am guessing. Parish most likely gets it directly from Bissell and I'd bet there's a personal relationship involved.

Personal relationships explains why some bars and some liquor stores can get certain beers and others can't. Its not always about volume of sales but that doesn't hurt. Parish certainly doesn't have the volume of beer sales that other places in Boston have but the owner is certainly pretty connected in the restaurant/bar industry.

Relationships also comes into play when you are looking for a place to buy kegs from, assuming you want to get harder to get local beer. Breweries that self distribute will only work with a handful of liquor stores. The relationship you have with the liquor store also comes into play. I've purchased from a bunch of different places and settled on one because I can talk directly to the owner and we'll spend sometimes 20 minutes or so talking about different options as he texts back and forth with some of his distributors to know what's available. Sometimes he'll call me with something different if my first choice doesn't work out and I can trust his recommendations as well. I've dealt with other ones that either seem annoyed to contact their distributor or they only talk to their distributors once or twice per week. Flexibility is also important if you want really great local beer. You have to be willing to wait or be willing to get something else in the mean time. I've sometimes been able to get a really great beer only to find out they only do half or quarter barrels. I have a dual tap so I need to do 2 sixth barrels (unless I kicked my wife's keg out of the kegerator which would not be a very good idea). I keep a spreadsheet of info on what breweries are available in kegs and what format. You can certainly get beers like Finback, SingleCut, Kelsen, Stoneface, Banded Horn, Beer'd, etc.. Nightshift is supposedly going to start doing kegs as well this year but they have limited distro. Jack's Abby is easy to get depending on what you want. So don't expect to get something like Bissell Brothers or Trillium but you can definitely get something almost in that range.