Kegging question

Once I fill and seal it, I usually let it fill for 30 seconds or so, and purge a good 4-5 times. From there I Just put it at serving pressure and put that into the kegerator to let it sit for 2 weeks. I keep my kegerator between 30 and 34 degrees and seems to work for me. I also have 10' of beer line to help balance everything out and I have minimal foam on the first pour.

 

You have to check your pressure and then play some football with your keg to let de Co2 dissolve, then add more, then more until the pressure doesn´t drop.

 

You should also pump the psi up to about 30 to seat the lid after filling. So siphon beer into empty keg, close lid, hook up gas and crank it up to 30 psi to seat lid. Then vent a few times to purge O2, set to correct PSI based on temp/ desired carb level and let it rest for a few days to carbonate.

**I'm new to this as well, but that has been my process on my first few kegs.

 

I keg all the time, and will never go back to bottling. Here a few tips, from all the kegging I've done...
So here's how you can go from your secondary to drinking in 15 mins. Force carbonation, it's the best!!

When you get the beer in the keg, hook up the gas, crank your regulator up to around 25 to 30 psi. Pull you vent on your keg for about 5 seconds. That's all it take to purge the keg. Then connect your keg to the tap. Push a little beer out to make sure your all is connected. Next set in a chair and lay the keg on your lap, and bounce it up and down with your legs. Every few minutes poor a little beer into a cup and check the head on the beer. When your head where you want it (about 15mins), turn the regulator down to 5 psi. Leave it at 5 psi for night as you enjoy your beer. The next day turn off the gas all together. Keep the gas off till the next time you want to start drinking. A lot of people will tell you to keep the gas at 5 psi, but I have notice when I do that the beer will keep absorbing the CO2 and you will get nothing but foam the next time you go to drink. So I keep CO2 off and turn it on as needed. If the head ever gets to small. Crank up the keg to 25 psi, and just bonce on your legs again, but normally once the keg is up to pressure it will stay at pressure unless you have a leak.

So if you keg Monday turn off the gas Tuesday morning, then check pressure Thursday and make sure your still pressurized...if so all good, if not crank the pressure up and look for leaks.

 

You were doing fine until you got to this nugget of 'advice'. Assuming a more or less typical beer - temp in the neighborhood of 38F, 2.5 vols CO2 - your beer is guaranteed to eventually become undercarbonated if you hold it at 5 psi. Once the carbonation level is correct, no matter how it got there, it should be set to serving pressure - 11psi, give or take - then left there until the keg kicks. You should never need to touch the regulator or 'fix' the carbonation level. Once the beer reaches equilibrium, it will not continue to absorb CO2. That would violate the laws of Physics. If you're pouring nothing but foam, then you have a problem that needs to be fixed. 5 psi with an occasional 25 psi boost is a bandaid. And turning the CO2 on and off every time you pour a beer is more than a little PITA, IMO. I keg mainly because I'm lazy. You're doing way too much work!

 

I don't why it happens, but the keg in a kegerator and every time I leave my co2 at 5 psi for days, it gets why too much head. I just started turning it off, and head pressure in keg stays and my head is pretty constant. Fixed the problem. Have no clue why it does, but above method works. I have only had to re-carb the beer one time, and that because I had leak on the seal of keg I didn't notice. Now I make sure the pressure stays and there is not leaks. I don't adjust the regulator, I just turn it off at the bottle.

You are right, ideally it should reach an equilibrium and it shouldn't be using or absorbing Co2....but some dumb reason that I can't figure out my beer keeps building head, even if I leave it just 5 psi. If i turn everything off, its like it is bottled and it stay the way I left it. So now I just turn off the Co2 when I am not using it. Works great for me.

 

From your description, you are undercarbing your beer. There is excessive head from too-high carbonation level (not in your case) and there is excessive head from too much pressure pushing the beer (most likely from a beer line too short with too little resistance). You really should be setting your pressure based on carb level for the style and serving temp. If you search Google you'll find a carbonation chart that shows how all this works. Then adjust your beer line length for the correct pour . . . this is how a keg system is balanced. In the Home Bar Forum there are multiple threads on this subject, search for "foam", "balancing", or "help".

To test your system pour a beer and give it a hard swish in your mouth. This causes the CO2 to off-gas and you will get a tingling effect. Then run the same test with a commercial equivalent, you will be able to tell if your carb level is correct.

For the OP: So I added C02 for 5 minutes and then I pulled the gas line off and purged it for 6 seconds. I hooked the gas back up and I heard it fill up again. Is this right?

Yes this is normal. To purge a keg you don't need to wait 5 minutes, just stabilize the pressure, then vent the headspace. If you've just filled a keg and want to get rid of any air, repeat this step 3-5 times (called "burbing"). For temperature you should ignore air temps in your kegerator and measure the temp of the beer.

 

That trumps everything else. If it works for you and you don't find it overly cumbersome, then, by all means, continue doing it. It's probably less annoying than the steps needed to troubleshoot and correct your system. (it's probably also less annoying than the unsolicited advice you'll inevitably get here! )

That said, you may want to spend some time researching how to correctly balance your system. There are some excellent discussions in the Home Bar forum here.

As I said, above, despite the foam, 5 psi is guaranteed to result in under carbonated beer. Since you don't sense that it's undercarbed, the problem could be as simple as a faulty gauge on the regulator (a $5 user-replaceable part). The regulator may, indeed, be holding the pressure at 11-ish psi when the gauge reads 5 (the cookie-cutter, mass produced gauge is, arguably, the weakest link in the system). The foaming issue could be a number of things, usually line temperature or dimensions.

Maybe it's OCD, but I need to know that everything in my system is working correctly. It makes things far more predictable and, when a problem comes up, I generally know how to fix it. Different strokes.

 

I'm not going to try and convince you to change your system. but what you are describing is un-possible.

your beer absorbs the same amount of CO2 as every other beer, given the same temperature.

I believe, as others have stated, there is not enough resistance in the system. 8' of 3/16" beverage line will slow down the pour and you will find it becomes difficult to produce foam. not applying pressure when you open the faucet is reducing the required resistance to get balanced. you can pour foam free because the beer is exiting the faucet very gently.
Cheers.

 

hop aroma fades and depending on the hop variety and amount of dry hopping it can fade pretty quickly.

did you vent the gas? CO2 can scrub volatile aromas from the liquid. if you have a leak or vented gas, that is where your aroma went.
Cheers.

 

Hop flavor and/or aroma fades over time, but if it virtually disappeared after only 9 days, my first guess would be oxidation. Before I got a beer gun, many of my IPAs were hopless by competition day, usually 7-14 days after bottling. Did you adequately purge the headspace? You should burp it at least 3 or 4 times. More is better, but diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly. There may be other causes - this is the one I've experienced first hand on more than one occasion.

 

by venting I mean pulling the pressure release valve after filling the keg with gas. this will release CO2 in the headspace.

do this when you first add the beer to the keg, it will knock out the oxygen and replace with CO2.
do this after you have dry hopped and you will vent aroma.
Cheers.

 

That doesn't sound like an effective technique (it's certainly not the way I do it )
The objective here is not to force CO2 into the beer. That comes later. All you care about, at this point, is getting the oxygen-laden air out of the headspace. You do that by repeatedly diluting it with CO2, then releasing it. Each repetition gets a bit more of the air out. I pressurize just until the gas stops flowing - a few seconds. Then vent it just until the gas stops escaping - again, a few seconds at most. Repeat three or four times. If you let it vent completely, there's nothing to keep air from infiltrating the headspace that you just cleared. When you vented it for 6 seconds, it's possible that you let some air back in.

This is not a definitive diagnosis, but something to consider.

 

one method that avoids messing with the keg is to hang the hops from a bag within the beer. as the level of beer drops the hops are not in the liquid.
not so easy with a sankey keg though.

I am surprised you lost so much aroma after 9 days though.

as a general rule, anything the LHBS tells you about draft beer... ignore.
Cheers.