balancing stout / nitro line

[morrillt]

Serving nitro at 30psi and getting way too much foam. Right now i am serving on 7 feet of 3/16 line.

Dave from kegman.com tells me 1 foot is 1.5# of pressure and that I need, 20 feet of beerline to balance the pressure, no where else says this. I am giving it a shot as we speak. But I want to know, how much nbeer line do i need to correctly balance a nitro tap?

Thanks
Todd

[lhall]

in my experience, the faucet itself provides the required restriction. We usually shoot for about 1.8-1.9 vol CO2 and then about 24 psi on the standard nitro blend. The faucet is basically knocking out most of the carbonation and giving the creamy head. If you have too much carbonation, you will get too much foam.

[OurMutualBrewer]

Anytime we have too much foam in a nitro beer, itsbecause we had too much C02 dissolved in the beer.

[Junkyard]

Agreed, there's too much co2 dissolved in the beer. For proper nitro pour there needs to be very little co2 dissolved. Length of line shouldn't matter a whole lot.

[krenshaw]

i carbonate any beers going to our nitro tap at about 25% of the amount that i would do for a regular keg.. if i'm just doing a couple for the nitro, after they are kegged, i'll add the other 75% of the carb to the rest and keg like usual.. took a bit of trial and error but seems to be working great for our system

[TGTimm]

If your beer is carbonated at all, you need to review your gas laws!

Using a pure nitro push on a carbonated ale will result in horrid foaming and eventually, flat beer. Find out what the equilibrium pressure is for the temperature and carb level of your beer. You need that pressure of CO2 in your nitro mix to maintain the carb level and prevent foaming. If your eq. CO2 pressure is 10 psi, and you're using 25/75 CO2/N2, then the total pressure will be 40 psi--10 psi CO2 + 30 psi N2.

For balancing beer lines (and everything from glass cleaning to line cleaning and more), consult this: http://www.draughtquality.org/wp-con...Full_Final.pdf Download it and read the whole thing--it's a valuable jewel.