Keg Failure Batch Losses - Weigh In Please

What kind of issue does "oops" mean?

I have batch #445 bottle conditioning right now. Over those 445 batches (25 years) of bottled beers I have suffered zero loss of beer.

Cheers!

 

Jack, we all know you’ve never done wrong. The question is whether your wife agrees.

 

LOL! Are you married?

The one thing I appreciate about my wife is she does not 'sugar coat' her thoughts about my beers.

She is not a fan of Belgian Ales and I brew a number of these beers (e.g., Dubbel, Triple, Quad,...). My preferred glass for drinking these beers is a Gulden Draak Tulip Glass and my wife calls it the 'bad glass' since I often use it to drink my Belgian Ales. Every once in a while she requests a sip from this 'bad glass' (I don't know why) and she will scrunch up her nose upon smelling it, take an extremely small sip, exclaim "yuck" accompanied with the usual statement of "why do you drink that 'stuff'!?! But she uses a different word for 'stuff'.

Now, she is a HUGE hop-head and I have a challenging time keeping IPAs 'in stock'. I have one bottle left of my Ekuanot IPA and she was a BIG fan of that batch. Pretty soon my Calypso/Citra/Simcoe IPA will complete bottle conditioning and hope that she will enjoy this batch; this is the first time I have combined these hops so....

I also have a couple of beers she bugged me to make so I named them after her:

• Kate's PITA Oatmeal Stout
• Kathleen's Spruce Ale

If you are a member of AHA you can read about Kathleen's Spruce Ale:

J. Horzempa, “Spruced Up Homebrew,”, Zymurgy, Vol.4, No. 3 (May/June 2018)

Life is a 'mixed bag'.

Cheers!

 

100+ kegged batches. None lost due to keg failure. One lost due to picnic tap failure.

 

25 batches kegged... lost about 2gal to a failed poppet. Luckily went to the butcher after I kegged and came back to put some meat in the my beer fridge... saw it before I lost the whole thing

 

About 100 batches kegged. I lost about a gallon of beer that I untapped without noticing that the poppet was leaking.

 

1. kegged about 100-150 batches, if not more.

2. never lost a batch due to keg failure. I've replaced all the o-rings on the kegs and washed them with PBW after purchasing to make sure they are in working order before I put beer in them.

 

48 batches kegged. None lost to keg failure. Cheers!

 

You know . . . regular stuff:

Carbonation: As a nob, always added the full pack of sugar NB included in kits. Didn't know what a priming calculator was but quickly learned about overcarbonated beer. With more experience (and a scale) there are still times of uneven carbonation. Also have bottled before fermentation is complete resulting in overcarbonation that a keg would have bypassed. I believe these all classify as operator error.

Grenades: Had two SN bottles fail, i.e. explode due to fatigue. Happened with different batches and remaining bottles were all carb'ed fine (before and since).

Infection: Submitted an award-winning beer to comp with a less than clean bottle. Judges tried to say something nice about the beer despite the fact it was dangerous.

Quantity: My co-brewer bottles so 2.5 gal per brew hit the bottling bucket. There is always half a bottle left . . . too much to top off other bottles but too little to keep.

 

Another instance of "operator error".

"Operator error" can occur in all aspects of the brewing process (start - finish).

Cheers!

 

63 batches kegged. 0 losses due to keg failure. 2 dumped batches due to brewer failure

 

The operator error comments remind me of my first soda keg experiences from the mid-late 1980s, working a concessions stand at a movie theatre. Before a big crowd was expected, we would consolidate syrup in kegs that were low so we could have all full kegs during busy times. These were pin lock kegs, no pressure release valve. To release the pressure, we would unhook the gas line and depress the poppet with a narrow screwdriver. Inevitably, the day came where I inadvertently depressed the liquid line poppet.

 

50+ batches
None lost

 

I still do that occasionally :-)

 

Totally interested in where this is coming from Vikeman....been kegging since 2007 or so, 13 years, averaging maybe 20 batches per year at 10 gallons, so guesstimating 400-500 5-gallon kegged beers (that maybe an overestimate though). Have lost 2 iirc...both from the same keg...my "Heady Topper" keg (I've label all my kegs with stickers of a favorite beer so I have names for all my corny kegs)...and both times it leaked the entire contents of the keg into the kegerator. Was a "first time, shame on it...second time, shame on me." Had to replace the gaskets and poppet and hasn't happened since. As far as i can remember that was the only two....not to say it hasn't happened otherwise in some other form....those were just the two truly "memorables."

 

Yep!

Indeed it is.

 

Me too.
I was also wondering how keg failure was being defined (which is why I differentiated picnic tap failure from keg failure, in case that shouldn't count).

 

60+, mostly 10 gallon batches into 2 kegs, no loss due to any sort of keg failure.

I actually can't remember the last time I had to repalce an o-ring for the same six kegs I have in rotation now... maybe I should just do that now... this thread probably just jinxed us all.

 

300+
Lost 2 batches to out post poppet failures draining a keg. Replaced poppets was fix.
Lost 1 batch due to outpost thread failure (best guess a leak came from under post). Was never able to actually fix this. Replaced keg.