How Much Does A Keg Of Beer Cost?

How Much Does It Cost to Buy a Keg? – So, how much does a keg for a kegerator cost? The short answer is between $100 and $200. If we’re talking empty beer kegs, the three main factors you have to consider are:

Keg size/type Keg brand Reseller/distributor

Naturally, a ¼ barrel keg will cost you less than a ½ barrel keg of the same brand. However, when it comes to different brands, things get complicated as certain manufacturers offer better quality (or additional features) and, therefore, charge differently for their products.

How many beers is in a keg?

Keg Sizing Information 1/2 barrel = 15.5 gallons = 124 pints = 165 12oz bottles – (Full Size Keg)

How long will a keg last?

How Long Does Draft Beer Remain Fresh? – There is no one hard and fast rule for how long a keg of draft beer will stay fresh. This is especially true for craft beers because different styles of beer last longer than others. A good rule of thumb is that the shelf life for a keg of pasteurized beer is about 90-120 days (or 3-4 months), and unpasteurized draft beer will last about 45-60 days (or 6-8 weeks) when stored at the proper temperature.

Many import and domestic beers are pasteurized. If you’re unsure whether or not your beer has been pasteurized, then treat it like it is unpasteurized. An important thing to remember is that countdown starts the day your keg is filled at the brewery, not when you tap it or buy it. One of the first things you should do when you pick up a keg is to check is the label to see if it has a “born on” date or expiration date.

If the beer in your keg is passed its expiration date, then we wouldn’t recommend drinking it.

Are beer kegs worth it?

Even if you’re having a smaller get-together, a keg could be worth it, depending on how long everyone will be there. For example, if you’re inviting people to come at 5 p.m. and expect them to hang around until midnight, they might want more than four drinks apiece.

How long will a keg stay fresh?

Kegerator – The kegerator is the king of beer dispensing, which is the reason why many restaurants rely on kegerators to dispense their kegs. Not only is the taste and experience of drinking beer from a kegerator better than other dispense systems, a kegerator is designed to preserve the quality of a keg.

With a refrigerator storage cabinet, the keg is stored at the ideal temperature for the specific beer that is stored inside. This temperature maintenance also prevents beer from being dispensed warm and foamy. The CO2 dispense system of a kegerator prevents oxygen from accessing the beer and maintaining the fresh brewery taste.

For a properly stored keg in a kegerator, how long the beer will remain fresh will depend on the style of beer. Pasteurized beers can stay fresh from three to six months. For non-pasteurized beers, you can expect the keg to stay fresh approximately two months.

Do kegs taste better?

Beer Freshness – Draught beer is loved across the nation and is the go-to choice for people visiting bars and restaurants. When you consider the product turnover at bars, pubs and restaurants, beer on tap sells a lot quicker than the bottles sitting in the fridge.

• Beer freshness has an immense impact on the brew’s flavour, which is why the beer poured from a keg is likely to be fresher (and tastier) than what you’d sip from the bottle.
• Freshness is always important, but absolutely crucial when you love a hoppy brew, like a pale ale or an IPA.
• This is because hoppier beers degrade in flavour over time, so the fresher the beer – the better the taste.

If you’re a small bar or restaurant, take a look at how we can design and install your venue’s perfect dispense system, or take a look at some of the bars and restaurants that have worked with us here,

Do you save money with kegs?

You know as well as we do that there are lots of reasons to get a kegerator :

Fresh draft beer at your fingertips whenever you want it. That look on your friends’ faces when they first lay eyes on your beer-pouring beauty. Say goodbye to sticky piles of bottles and cans filled with one last forgotten sip. No more senseless driving to the bar just to enjoy a pint or two.

All good stuff for sure. But here’s one you might not have thought of: a kegerator eventually pays for itself. We know what you’re thinking (“Whhhhaaaaaaatttttt?!?!?), but we aren’t joking. You can have that sweet delicious draft beer, make your friends jealous, never have to clean up gross bottles and cans again, make fewer trips to your local watering hole, AND save tons of money on your favorite craft beers. Note that beer prices vary by location. To be able to present real-world numbers and not just make stuff up, we ran all these numbers at our local beer store, but your results are likely to be slightly different. That being said, you can certainly see the trend.

1. As you can see, a keg saves you money no matter what you like to drink.
2. Obviously, many craft beers are only available in six-packs or kegs, so the savings are particularly significant.
3. But even regular domestic brews go down in price when you “buy in bulk” with a keg.
4. Now comes the fun part.
5. By taking the numbers from the above table, we calculated that the “average” savings per keg (assuming a rotation between craft and macro offerings) is $67.18.

That means that it would take 9 kegs to save enough money to purchase an entry-level kegerator. For most people, that’s less than a year! So there you have it. Not only does a kegerator make your life better, more convenient, and infinitely more delicious, it also pays for itself almost as fast as you can say “Bottoms up!”

How much does a 20l keg cost?

Keg Sizes & Cost

Keg size	Keg volume	Average keg cost (USD)
Corny keg	5 gallons (18.9 L)	$115
Sixth barrel	5.2 gallons (20 L)	$110
Quarter barrel	7.7 gallons (29 L)	$135
Half barrel	15.5 gallons (58.7 L)	$150

Can you get every drink in a keg?

Making the Switch to Kegged beverages – If you switch from selling beverages in bottles and cans to selling kegged drinks, you’ll get rid of a great deal of cardboard, bottles, marketing labels, plastic, and materials that go into shipping wines and ingredients.

• Egged beverages are a greener approach to operating a business.
• Beverages in kegs stay fresh for an extended period of time.
• Particularly wine can stay fresh for up to two months! In a busy restaurant or a bar, you will go through a keg of wine in just a week or two, so it will never go bad, and you will eliminate a large amount of waste from your establishment.

You can keg practically any beverage of choice with the proper care and attention to detail. However, it is imperative to keep your lines clean regardless of the beverages you serve. Similar to the importance of beer line cleaning, you want to use lines that don’t add flavors to your drinks and won’t corrode over time because of the sugars or fruits in your drinks (particularly in sweet cocktails!).

Regular maintenance is a necessity to keep your lines clean and without bacteria. If you want to learn more about line cleaning & maintaining the health of your draft system, you can watch the recording of our webinar on this topic below. With a wide variety of beverages, we have created this guide to share the process for kegging wine, cocktails, cold brew, and kombucha.

Where would you like to start? You should be familiar with kegged beer, but what about other favorite beverages like wine? You can keg wine and implement your own wine-on-tap system – it’s an affordable and sustainable option! Draft wine is essentially wine stored in a keg instead of in a bottle.

It is becoming more popular as it is not only more cost-effective and easier on the inventory, but it is also more environmentally friendly as it reduces the use of bottles. There are two mainstream concepts for drafting your wine — selecting the gas used during kegging and serving the wine. Both ideas are relatively simple and remain cost-effective, but both are essential to the process.

Exposing your wine to different kinds of gas will result in varying tastes across the still and sparkling spectrum. With a gas tank and regulator, still wines typically revolve around argon or nitrogen, and sparkling wines require further exposure to carbon dioxide.

• Crafting wine is both a science and an art, so great attention to detail is quintessential.
• Luckily for you, these days, many wineries sell their wines in kegs thanks to companies like Free Flow Wines that help reduce waste from wine bottles.
• They create stainless steel kegs for wine and work with wineries and distributors to make the trend of purchasing kegged wine easier & faster for those operators that want to offer the quality that comes with draft wine to their patrons.

If you are unable to find your desired wine in a keg, these steps will allow you to keg a wine you either make or purchase in boxes yourself

1. Clean and sanitize the keg: You do not want any bacteria or materials to alter the taste or safety of your wine. Clean stainless steel tanks are ideal for tapping and storing mass amounts of wine.
2. Deposit the wine: Siphon your wine into the keg and place a lid on top.
3. Eliminate oxygen in the keg: This step is known as “pushing out.” It’s done by connecting a gas disconnect and pushing gas in and out of the keg.
4. Listen for gas hissing through the keg: Completing this process several times for good measure is the recommendation.
5. Enjoy: Your wine is then ready for serving or further carbonation.

Kegs reduce oxidation. Large stainless steel tanks will eliminate the chances of air flowing in and altering the taste of the wine, as they’re sealed airtight. Assuring that taste stays the same each night depends on catering to the types of wine your customers enjoy.

• Taste: Good wine is good wine regardless of how you store it. You can’t make bad wine taste better by storing it in a bottle. Increasingly, we find that quality wineries store as much wine as possible in kegs.
• Storing wine in a keg avoids overheating and oxidation. It also helps the wine to keep its proper flavor. That’s because the wine never touches the air until it is served. It is also less affected by variations in temperatures. When you serve wine on tap, you won’t serve your customers wine from half-empty bottles or bottles that have been stored improperly.
• Efficiency and Environmental Impact: There are two ways in which using draft wine is more efficient and environmentally friendly. Let’s say a restaurant serves 100 wine kegs in a year. A keg contains about 26 bottles. Those 26 bottles include 39 pounds of packaging waste, including the boxes they came in, corks, and foil wrapping, not to mention the bottles themselves. Using kegs means less cleanup, less mess, and more environmental benefits. It is also efficient because when a customer wants to have just a small taste of the wine to see if they want more, it is much easier to serve.
• Cost: In most cases, you can recover the costs of installing a wine-on-tap system within six months. It can cost significantly less to serve a quality glass of wine on tap than from a bottle. Since there is almost no waste with kegged wine, you will save a good amount of money. This will allow you to buy a better quality of wine, and then you can also pass some of the savings on to your customers, which helps ensure repeat business.

Crafting each cocktail individually becomes very time-consuming for your bartenders or waitstaff. With kegging your cocktails in batches and ahead of time, there’s no need to prepare a mixed drink right on the spot with varying results, which dramatically improves your serving efficiency & simplifies your operations.

• In the area of kegging drinks, our customers, aka PourMyBeer family members, have seen some of their biggest success through kegging cocktails,
• Hear from one of our operators to learn what self-pour Margaritas brought to their business! Batching cocktails is a very similar process to making a single portion.

It takes a few batches to practice to perfect your recipe. Generally, you will want to start by multiplying the ingredients and then slightly adjust the recipe as needed to serve a large crowd. There are important rules to follow if you want to serve any draft drink, which we will dive into below.

PourMyBeer Tip: Always label your keg with the date of when the cocktail was batched as many cocktails infuse citrus blends and other perishable ingredients that can expire rather quickly. Perfect the recipe for a cocktail before you put it in the keg. Take your time and make sure you get the recipe correct.

You’re not serving one drink at a time but instead preparing a recipe for a large number of people. Remember that about one-fifth of every cocktail is actually water that comes from the ice or the way the cocktail is prepared. Generally speaking, you can use a dilution rate of 25-35% for all shaken cocktails (i.e.

Can a keg burst?

Repair safety – 1. Leave manual weld repair to the professionals – Manual weld repairs on a pressure vessel should only be performed by a professional capable of performing sanitary welding with interpass temperatures of below 300 Degrees F. The primary reason for this is that the yield and the ultimate tensile strength of weld metal are both functions of the interpass temperature.

• Furthermore if the weld is too hot, there is a build-up of “weld-sugar” on the inside of the keg, which is very hard to be removed and which will most likely leave some rough area, not complying with the food zone specifications.
• After the welding is performed on the pressure vessel, it is necessary to pickle and passivate the inside of the keg to remove the weld scale (oxidation layer) as well as the free iron.

Free iron is the enemy of beer, as it will make the beer taste bitter. The acceptable free iron content should not be more than 1.5mg per 15.5 gallons of liquid, but a good pickling line will be able to drop this down to 0.35mg per 15.5 gallons of liquid.2.

Frozen kegs – When full kegs are exposed to below freezing temperatures during the winter months or because the walk-in thermostat is set too low, the beer will start freezing from the outside towards the center of the keg. Since the ice is expanding the volume by 9%, it creates hydraulic pressure on the keg, and depending on the size and type of keg the following will happen: * Half Barrel kegs and squat quarter kegs (Pony kegs): frozen kegs show that both bottom and top dome are pushed out, which irreversibly deforms the keg and moves the neck out of position, so it cannot run through the automatic fill-lines.

* Slim Quarter and Sixth Barrel kegs: frozen kegs show three vertical cuts spaced 120 degree apart on the cylindrical walls, where the metal gave way due to the hydraulic pressure.3. If a keg was frozen, never attempt to mechanically push the top dome back down using a shop press or other mechanical press, as this will seriously weaken the stainless steel construction of the keg.

If the neck is too high to run down your racking line, take the valve out and scrap your keg.4. Overheated kegs – When full kegs are exposed to fire or excessive heat, the liquid will boil and overheated steam will pressurize the keg to the point where either the EPDM CO2 valve might disintegrate, at which point the keg becomes a torpedo, or the ball valve being ejected like a bullet from the keg, or the metal structure will be destroyed by tearing or rupturing.

There are a lot of different failure modes possible, but the point is to prevent that from happening by not throwing full kegs into a fire just for fun.5. Burst pressure – Stainless steel kegs are rated for an internal pressure of at least 60 to 90 PSI without deformation, with a burst pressure of at least 300 PSI.

The safety factors for burst pressure is usually about three to four, so the new keg does not actually rupture until it is exposed to 1000 PSI internal pressure or more. A lot of the new kegs can be purchased with a special pressure relief-valve in the form of a burst disc, which is a small circle stamp on the bottom dome of the keg, which is designed to break out at a certain design pressure to prevent the valve from becoming the weakest point of the pressure vessel.

Never intentionally pressurize the keg to more than the design pressure using compressed air, to prevent damage to the keg or worse injuring yourself or innocent bystanders. The reason for this is that while liquid is incompressible, air can be compressed to the point of becoming very dangerous, like a rocket or a torpedo.

How do you refill a keg?

Avoid Overfilling Your Keg – Many first time keggers fall into the trap of overfilling their kegs. This can have disastrous consequences, especially is beer escapes through the gas disconnect and into your co2 regulator when force carbing — effectively destroying the regulator.

1. You can get a gas disconnect fitted with a check valve to prevent this issue, but it’s best practice to avoid overfilling in the first place.
2. You need to leave a certain amount of head space in your keg to aid in carbonation and prevent beer escaping out of the gas disconnect.
3. One easy way to do this is to weigh your keg as you fill it; one kilogram more or less equates to one litre of beer.

If you put your empty keg on a heavyweight scale, zero it and start filling, you can keep an eye on how many litres of beer are in the keg at anytime. If you’re using a corny keg, it’s a good idea to stop when you get to around 18 litres. Using scales can also help you keep an eye on how quickly the beer is flowing, or if it’s stopped, either due to a blockage or too much pressure within the keg.

• If you don’t have heavyweight scales, you can prepare in advance by ensuring your fermenter is marked to measure the amount of beer inside.
• In this way, you can simply count down the litres.
• Alternatively, you can fill your keg at a slight angle.
• Raise the dip tube side of the keg by around 1 or 2 cm and fit a short hose to the gas disconnect, then fill your keg until beer runs out of the hose.

When you put the keg level, the beer will be beneath the gas disconnect, leaving adequate head space.

How fast to drink a keg?

How Long Does a Keg Stay Fresh? – For most beers on tap, dispensed with CO2, the rule of thumb is that non-pasteurized beer will retain its freshness for 45-60 days, if proper pressure and temperature are maintained. If you are serving up pasteurized draft beer, the shelf life is around 90-120 days.

1. If you have just gotten an air pumped party keg, you should consume the beer within 8-12 hours if you want to enjoy it at peak freshness.
2. You will find that most breweries now print a freshness date on the keg for your convenience.
3. Be sure to read the labeling carefully, as some breweries print this as an expiration date, while others opt for a “born on” date.

These dates have the days it is in inventory at the brewery figured into the equation and generally print the date on the side of the keg or on the cap.