Near miss

So, thanks to a most excellent find at a local industrial surplus supply (junk) store, I scored a bunch of extra corny kegs, and started using them as secondary fermentors. The main reason for this was to end the pain in the ass known as siphoning, and just use co2 to push the beer from secondary fermenting keg to a serving keg. This is easy enough to do -- just take a three foot piece of tubing, and connect OUT black disconnects to both ends, like the ones you have attached to your faucet. Keep em in place with a couple of hose clamps, and you have a jumper.

Attach the jumper to both kegs' beer out posts. Put a bit of gas in the keg you want to move the beer from, and pop the lid off the serving keg to be and viola, the magic of physics moves the beer from point A to point B.

Today was the day I was going to move an IPA I had in secondary to a serving keg. So, I connected the jumper, and for some unknown reason, I hit the release valve on the secondary fermenting keg, where the beer was. Beer shot out through the release valve. That thing was under some serious pressure.

Since I don't use a hydrometer (so kill me), I must have transfered the beer into secondary before fermentation was complete. Since the keg was sealed, the pressure in that keg just grew and grew. In fact, when I connected the jumper, half the keg moved to the serving keg with no additional CO2 at all!

Hate to think what would have happened if I had waited another week. .I'm guessing one serious, messy IPA keg explosion. Which would have been a real shame, because preliminary tastings indicate that IPA is going to be damn good in about two to three weeks.