This guide is split into two parts
history & comparison and general corny maintenance and other info. Part two is in the 2nd post below.
It's fairly typical that someone is going to say I've knobbled the numbers, but it's based on general availability of prices I saw last year (this has been sitting on my desktop for a while).
Ever since getting into home brewing Corny Kegs seem to be on the lips of most serious homebrewers. It’s pretty easy to see why. Corny kegs can be bought 2nd/3rd/4th/etc hand for around £35 – though some work may be required in getting them pressurised.
Corny kegs were originally made by Cornelius Inc in the US, though now several different manufactures make similar kegs. You can expect to pay up to £130 for a new one – an insane price when you look at other cheaper systems on the market.
Originally used by the soda industry to transport syrups etc around they have a number of advantages over plastic kegs, especially the budget ones with 2” caps you can buy in Wilkinsons.
- Made mostly of stainless steel and rubber, almost all the parts are serviceable and can survive a drop.
- Small to medium hands can get inside and give them a scrub (try that on a youngs barrel)
- Blocks all light (no skunking)
- Most people at events seem to have them – so easy to hook up.
- Compatible with most accessories.
Whilst there are two sorts of post (not interchangeable), they are standardised so that your disconnects for a ball lock will fit other ball locks and pinlocks pinlocks etc.
Lets look at the alternatives:
Bottling
A good, bottle conditioned beer is hard to beat. You have several advantages – a dirty vessel will only cause problems with one bottle – you won’t loose the batch (Assuming your primary and / or bottle bucket was clean)
You’ll usually find sediment at the bottom of a bottle which can be off putting to people used to “normal” beer. The big producers manage sediment free beer by force carbonation bottling – no priming.
The disadvantage is having to store 40 bottles for a 5 gallon batch. And clean 40 bottles. And sanitise/sterilise 40 bottles. Then prime 40 bottles (or use a bottling bucket). Then fill 40 bottles. Then cap 40 bottles. Then have your significant other complain because you’ve got a slow build up of bottles in a specialised bin or drying on the worksurface...
The plus side is that you’ll only be paying out for caps and a capper to use bottling – about £25 for a decent two handed capper and a pack of caps. You can also add a bottling wand into this, bottle tree and a bottle cleaner if you want luxury. £100 probably all in.
Plastic Kegging
Plastic kegging is nice and cheap and it’s often how many homebrewers enter the market. Either they’re bought or inherit a keg from someone else. There are three main types of plastic keg – King kegs (large 4” cap easy to get your hand in with a tap mounted 2/3rd of the way up the keg; hambleton bard s30 kegs (extinct but available 2nd hand) 4” wide opening for hand access and a removable bottom mounted tap and nut; finally the youngs style – 2” cap, threaded hole for tap and cheap plastic lid. You can replace the youngs cheap cap with an S20/30 style cap (recommended as the plastic one occasionally builds up so much pressure the tap leaks as my car will testify)
Barrels take up less space and are lighter than 40 bottles. Only one requires a clean, sanitising/sterilising as opposed to all those bottles. You only need to prime the one vessel and you only need to rack to one too.
With CO2 injection it can keep for months as long as you’re careful when dispensing. Dispensing is an art – you have to judge when the flow has dropped sufficiently that it requires a top up. A quick 1 second squirt is all that is needed to make more beer flow forth.
If you don’t have CO2, you have to make sure you stop before oxygen is pulled back through the beer making it stale.
The downside is that the CO2 cartridges are very, very expensive. They’re heavy too, so they cost a lot to ship, so if your local home brew store doesn’t stock them, expect to pay a premium.
Barrels go from £25-£50, £19 for a S30 cartridge if yours has a brass valve on it. A cheap Wilkinsons barrel CO2 lid kit will cost £25 and you’ll need some little dinky co2 cartridges for £5. A S30 valve can be fitted to this for about £15. So for a top range barrel, £70 – if you buy cheap, £60 for a much more inconvenient barrel and much more to modify it to work. You don’t need a CO2 injector, but you better hope you drink your beer within a fortnight without one.
Polypins
Cheapest option. Polypins cost from £5 online with no box to £19 with box in your local home brew store. It’s a plastic bag with a tap on it basically, and as the beer comes out, the vacuum brings the bag in meaning no oxygen is pulled back through the beer making it go stale. The bags are still permeable by oxygen and the beer will eventually go stale. You’ll still need to wash it if you want to reuse it, but no ongoing additional costs.
Casks
The real ale friend. You can’t get metal 2nd hand casks – they’re pretty much always owned by someone and caskwatch is a system for recovering “lost” or stolen kegs.
Buying one is quite expensive and it needs a lot of consumables – probably only a few pence each, but you need to buy in bulk: Keystone, Hard Spile, Soft Spile, Shive. Like all kegs, you’ll only need to clean and sterilise the cask before each use, put in the keystone and rack your beer in. Condition in place and when you’re ready, smack the hard spile into place, praying that it’s not over primed. Once that’s done, you can using a tap and hammer, smack the tap in, remove the hard spile and swap with the soft spile when you’re ready to serve.
You can get smaller plastic “casks” (there’s all sorts of names which are specific to the size, but we won’t go into that here) but they all require the same (but different sized) plastic consumables.
You can add a cask breather which injects a CO2 blanket on top of the beer keeping it for longer. CAMRA will not be impressed though.
Expect to pay about £60-75 for a new cask, £5 for bits, £15 for a tap.
Sanke vs Corny
Sanke
Sanke is very much the most used professional system by small and large brewers alike. It’s standard. A home brewer often has two choices when looking into a good quality system – do I go corny or sankey?
Sankes big advantage is that _everyone_ in the professional trade uses them these days. There are some different types (S types, D types etc)
Expect to pay about £50 for a brand spanking new keg. They’re mass produced – and you can get your brewery name stamped into them. You’ll need a tool for taking off the connectors (£25 unless you make your own) – each fitting is around £25-30. Of course you’ll also need a number of other things such as a regulator, gas and beer lines, line cleaner, tap, CO2 bottle. But the “base” cost is about £100.
Cleaning a really rotten/dried Sanke keg is a complete pig or so I’m told, however most keep them pressurised and moist so they wash out without too much effort. In industry a hot caustic wash is used, but that comes with a fair few risks to the amateur brewer.
Corny
Corneys can be picked up for as little as £35. Their prices do spike from time to time, but that’s about as cheap as they get. The connectors (of which you’ll need two) are £7 each (£15 total) if you get them with line spikes on. So that’s £50. Cheaper than Sanke – but they’ve been abandoned in the face of Sanke. At the moment there is lots of demand from the amateur market to keep Corny parts continually manufactured. So it’s no big problem yet. Come back in a 5-10 years and the tune may have changed.
What’s the rest of the setup you’d need for both Sanke and Corny?
CO2 gas bottle – it’s rare to find bottles without a contract. Mine was £18 for the bottle and £16 a refill for 6.35kg. From what I can see, that’s pretty cheap - £35
Regulator - £30
Regulator to 3/8 gas line - £2.30
Beer/Gas line – 75p a meter (needs two meters probably)
Tap - £25+
Sanke total - £195 all in for a single keg/tap system
Corny keg total - £145 all in for a single keg/tap system.
Conclusions
So looking at comparisons:
Polypin: £5-£19
Plastic Keg: £25-£70
Bottling: £25-£100
Cask: £95
Corny: £145
Sanke £195
I’d imagine that pretty much every homebrewer starts off bottling and kegging in a plastic keg and migrates up or loses interest. After all, the vessel makes very little difference in the quality of the beer and that’s what is key. The rest is convenience.
Not much difference really at the end of the day.
The clincher for me is easier access into the keg if I want to clean something without doing a caustic wash.