keykegs fobbing

[Brewberosa]

Have had some issues with keykegs excessively foaming the last week. The beers seemed in spec going out but have been troublesome once tapped. Dispense is an area I know ridiculously little about (considering my profession) so would appreciate an insights.

[TGTimm]

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The ABA Draught Beer Quality Manual is the bible for draught system design, maintenance, and serving.

[BrewinLou]

Keeping co2 in suspension is all about temperature and pressure. Every temperature has an equalization pressure to hold carbonation in suspension. Are you using a carbonation tester on your brews? At the serving station does each keg have a regulator of a bunch of kegs on one regulator?

[TGTimm]

Keeping co2 in suspension is all about temperature and pressure. Every temperature has an equalization pressure to hold carbonation in suspension. Are you using a carbonation tester on your brews? At the serving station does each keg have a regulator of a bunch of kegs on one regulator?

Too many kegs on one regulator is a very common problem, causing the beer to foam badly during high-demand times. My rule-of-thumb is no more than four kegs/secondary regulator. Using too small of line to the reg is a problem, too. You have to be able to replace the served beer with CO2 as fast as it's served, and with two or three faucets open, this is a fair amount of gas to push through under-sized lines.

If your cooler is quiet enough (unlikely), you can listen to hear how fast the CO2 is recharging when pouring hot and heavy. If you can hear gas flowing after the faucets are closed, your gas system is restricted/overtaxed.

[Brewberosa]

If kegs were filled incorrectly, and foam built up inside the kegs, then, given proper dispense pressure and temperatures, would it be the case that foam would not break out at dispense and instead the keg would dispense slightly under the normal number of pints?

[Brewberosa]

Maybe the better question would be how to tell and what to do if too much foam was present at packaging?

[BrewinLou]

Hey Brewber,
In general, in my brewery we carbonate to 2.4 atmospheres prior to packaging. If you take a look at this chart....https://www.kegerators.com/carbonation-table/ if our tank is at 34F we need to keep 8 psi head pressure on the tank to keep our carbonation in suspension. So as we package we add co2 head pressure to the tank to keep the co2 in the beer.
The same logic goes for serving. Here in the USA we like to serve beer in the mid 40Fs. So we need the regulator in our draft cooler set to close to 12-14 psi. There are also so other variables that play a roll in keeping the CO2 in suspension, like beer line diameter and length.

Finally, some of our customers have fairly proprietary systems and may have higher pressure settings. Once your beer is tapped at a location it may take 48 hour to reach equilibrium to the different pressure/temp setting. When a customer complains we usually go check their system, are the beer lines being cleaned regularly, is there proper pressure on the keg etc.. If we can find no problem we swap the keg out and take it back to the brewery and run tests with it hooked up to our draft system. I found one keg with a tiny hole in the spear once, that was a real perplexing issue. Cheers.

[TGTimm]

Brewberosa: We regularly serve from partial kegs with no foaming problems whatsoever.

How are your beer lines cooled? Do you serve directly from the cooler? What are your line lengths? Are you faucets cooled?

Anything warm in the serving system will cause excessive foaming. What brought this to mind was one of our glycol line cooling pumps died last night, and the beer immediately began to foam.