New Kegs
We were very happy to purchase 70 used kegs off the local Miller distributor today. They are Seagrams wine cooler kegs, a product that is now discontinued. We got them for a measly 10 bucks a keg! That doesn’t happen very often! While brewing Schild Brau today, I was cleaning out the berry flavor from the kegs with a concentrated solution of chlorinated caustic. We don’t want Berry Schild Brau!
New kegs cost 75 bucks a pop. When you multiply that by 70 you can see how that can add up quickly. We are so poor, our whole keg fleet is used kegs. We have Olympia, Heileman, Rainer and all sorts of defunct brewery kegs. We try to be good about other microbrewery kegs, but if the breweries are real far away, well its hard to do anything about it if there is a mixed up keg or two. The one brewery we avoid is A-B because they are real good about taking them back.
One time we had an A-B guy drive all the way out here to fetch two kegs that got mixed up at a festival in Des Moines! It must be nice to be able to bar code scan them and track them like they do. We number ours, but we still seem to lose dozens of them every year.
We really need them because we are having a tough time in our basement with our expanded beer line up. We have six beers we are producing, and only five bright beer tanks. The Schild Brau needs two bright tanks because it moves so fast. So that leaves three bright tanks for five beers. After we bottle, we need to keg off the rest of the beer in the tank so that we can clean it and fill it up with the next beer. The last few weeks the lack of kegs has been a real bottleneck.
So be nice to our kegs and bring them back soon!
June 11th, 2004 at 9:27 am
Aaron,
Does the Miller guy have any kegs left? Us homebrewers, are always looking for legally acquired kegs to cut the tops off and use for our brew setups.
Thanks
June 11th, 2004 at 12:16 pm
The “miller guy” was Fleck Distributing. We bought almost all of their ‘extra’ kegs, but there were a few that had European valve’s that we passed on.
We also have a few dead guys around here. I’m afraid that Chris won’t charge you less than 20 bucks a keg. They need new valve stems, and they seem to be endlessly backordered. Maybe you can sweet talk him out of them.