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A portable CO2 setup for serving homebrew out of kegs
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This year I'm supplying homebrewed beer to two weddings. One was last weekend and it was a big success. I brought 4 kegs of beer and returned with no beer.
Having a keg system is great at home, but more of a pain when serving beer at parties or other events. The CO2 cylinder that I use holds 20 pounds of CO2 and weighs even more and is difficult to travel with.
An alternative is to use the little disposable 12 gram CO2 cartridges. A company makes an adapter that will connect of these to a soda keg (used by many homebrewers), but it takes 3 12g cartridges to dispense a full keg. The cartridges cost about $1.50 each and aren't reusable and don't keep a steady pressure on the keg.
Paintball guns use small CO2 cylinders which are refillable, but they don't use a standard fittings. I've asked around for a little while, but none of the homebrew people that I knew had a way to hook them up to a standard regulator. Paintball gun regulators output a much higher pressure than what you need for beer and aren't very stable.
While flipping through Zymergy I found a little blurb on a company selling beverage regulators for paintball CO2 bottles. They sell entire kits, or just the fitting for the paintball CO2 cylinder. A friend offered to give me some paintball CO2 cylinders and I already had some CO2 regulators, so I just bought the adapter fitting from them. You can do this if your regulator takes 1/4" NPT left hand thread fittings (most beverage regulators do, most welding ones do not).
Everything arrived and I put it together just before last weekends wedding. You can see the final result in the photo above hanging between the trashcans. We served 4 full 5 gallon kegs and the bottle appears to have plenty of CO2 left. The whole setup (regultor, beer lines, two paintball CO2 cylinders) was small enough to carry in a plastic shopping bag.
This would also work great in an apartment if you wanted to keep beer kegs in your kitchen fridge. The small paintball CO2 cylinder is much smaller than a normal 5# or 10# CO2 cylinder. You can buy kits for refilling them from regular CO2 cylinders with a special kit or get them refilled at a paintball shop. It cost me $4 and about 5 minutes to refill a 16oz cylinder at the local paintball shop.
This would also be a great thing for a homebrew club to own and rent out to it's members for parties and other events.
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Maji discovers body art...
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I woke up on a recent Sunday morning to find that my white and orange cat was now pink, blue, and orange. We gave him a bath, then he ran outside and colored his fur again using some neighborhood sidewalk chalk.
I'm expecting him to come home with tattoos and body piercing any day now.
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Dreaming of cargo bikes...
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When I was a kid I went with my family to Zimbabwe a few times to visit relatives. One of the things that I remember from these trips were the basic cargo bikes. They used a smaller front wheel so that they could fit a huge basket.
I often integrate the bus into my bike trips so most cargo bikes or XtraCycle conversions wouldn't work for me. While thinking about this I remembered those African cargo bikes and thought it would be cool to make one.
Here is what I came up with:
The rear wheel is 559mm, but the front wheel is only 406mm. The rest of the geometry is fairly typical touring bike geometry, except for much lower trail (to work well with big loads up front). It should be possible to fit a huge basket or flat rack on top of that front wheel. It shouldn't be a big deal to carry a few grocery bags or a large box up front. The wheelbase is about the same as a normal bike, so it would work with normal bus mounted racks. Some folks will find the use of drop bars on a cargo bike to be weird, but I find flat bars to be weird. Flat bars would offer a little more cargo space, but I think that the bars are high enough off of the front wheel to prevent this from being a big problem.
I made this in BikeCAD and the .bcad file is here.
Now I just near to learn to braze or weld...
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Bike Distance/Time vs Car Distance/Time
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I was talking to a friend today about a bike ride that I had just done and he seemed amazed at how far I had gone. I was thinking to myself that it seemed like a short ride. I had only ridden from Ravenna down to the north end of West Seattle and back to Lake Union.
While coming home I realized that this is probably a case of bike distance/time vs car distance/time. Cyclists (and pedestrians) move at a fairly constant rate no matter where they are riding. True I might climb more slowly or descend more quickly than my average speed, but at the end of the day my riding speed is pretty much always the same.
Cars are different. Some roads are built for very high speed travel and some are built for low speed travel. It takes me the same amount of time to drive to my mother in law's house that is 4 miles away as to drive to my office that is 15 miles away. The big difference is that I have to take 30mph speed limit roads with lots of traffic signals to the mother in law's, but I can drive at 60mph with no lights to get to work. Distance isn't the most important factor here, it is the type of road and the number of traffic intersections.
I think this is one reason why I love city cycling. In the highest density parts of most cities there is no advantage to being in a car vs being on a bicycle when you look at the time that it takes to get from point A to point B. A 4 mile car ride that takes me 20 minutes (common in Seattle if you are going east/west) means I'm only averaging 12mph. On a bicycle I can pretty easily get the same average and I get some exercise and don't have to look for parking. Isn't being a cyclist great?
I should probably stop communicating bike trips in miles and just communicate them in time.
alex