Corni kegs

[Bigster]

Have been reading all the great advice on previous posts and just wanted some reassurance that how I intend to treat my new beloved corni was OK:

I have a fully geared up corni with a regulator which I believe is set to 10psi
I do not need to take it apart or tinker with posts etc
I am going to clean it with oxy cleaner like cillit bang to get rid of stinky syrup smell.
I intend to get some iodophor and will also pump some through the beer pipe and tap
I intend to keep my beer in primary for 10 days, add finings and leave in primary for another week before racking ( bright hopefully) beer straight to corni. Good / bad idea
Dont intend to prime in corni but keep pressure at 10psi for a week or 2.

I did a trial run with water and 10psi served half the corni before giving up. I guess with beer I will drop pressure to serve - during a session how many pints served before co2 needs adding?

Cheers all

[Andy]

In my experience the syrupy smell is really ingrained in the rubber washers fitted to the gas-in and product-out tubes and unless you either replace or heavily clean these then the smell will remain.

I've replaced them on most of my cornies along with the lid seal and the poppets.

I would always dismantle any used cornie and give it a real clean/service - this means removing the posts (not hard!).

[Bigster]

cheers guys - more food for thought

[Kev.]

Dont intend to prime in corni but keep pressure at 10psi for a week or 2.

You can calculate the carbonation you want in your beer accurately with a carbonation chart by adjusting the storage tempreture of your corni and psi of your co2 reg.

http://www.northernbrewer.com/instructions/co2.htm

[mysterio]

My rubber seals still have that syrup smell but it's nowhere to be found in the beer so I wouldn't worry about that too much.

The 3/16 line is cheap and definately a good idea to get a good few meters to experiment with.

Iodophor is good stuff. I fill the cornie two thirds full of water, along with the pipes, disconnects, poppets, posts etc, put a couple of caps of iodophor in and leave it for a few minutes. Then I put a fermentation bucket over the top and turn the keg over so that the other half gets a soak, then seal the keg and run some through the beer line and tap.

Also don't be tempted to carbonate your beer the quick way by cranking the PSI up and shaking the keg, this gives the beer a very harsh bitter aftertaste.