This review is by Homebrew Finds Contributor Brad Probert. Brad is an engineer, expert homebrewer and experienced reviewer. Grab a link to Brad’s website at the end of this review.
Nukatap Flow Control Keg Faucet
There are a wide variety of options for how to take your kegged homebrew with you to a party or meet up with friends. There is a big draw to kegging your homebrew because of how it simplifies the process of serving your beer after it’s finished in the fermentor. But it’s obviously less portable than individual bottles. There are mini keg/growlers you can fill from the tap, or bottle fillers that you can connect right to your tap. But these options all come with the extra step of cleaning and filling additional “stuff”. Being able to serve directly from the keg has advantages from that perspective.
Flow Control Faucet Disassembled
The most common option of serving from the keg is the picnic tap/cobra tap attached to a length of beer tubing. The downside of cobra taps is their propensity to fail, or propensity of your partygoers to not know what they’re doing and end up spilling/wasting a lot of beer. A jockey box is great for a bigger event where you’re going to be pouring a lot of beer over a longer period of time. But these are expensive, big/bulky to haul around, and makes another thing that has an involved cleaning process afterwards.
There have been ball lock keg faucets out on the market for some time. But unless you’re using these on a growler with a restrictive dip tube in it, these aren’t very practical. Putting a regular faucet on a keg gives you a cup of mostly foam unless you take special care to nearly de-carb your beer first (and who likes flat beer?). For these to work properly when directly attached to a keg, you need a flow control faucet. Kegland’s ball lock shank – Review – has the same interface as a regular keg shank like you have on your keezer, so they just mate this to their regular Nukatap. Then you can serve directly from the keg, and it’s not a big piece of gear to haul around with you or clean up later.
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Nukatap Flow Control Keg Faucet
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There is nothing more convenient than a keg faucet when you have ball lock kegs. This Nukatap Flow Control Keg Faucet fits any ball lock keg, and provides foaming control as well as dispensing. Flow control is especially important in a keg faucet, which does not have 4′ of 3/16″ interior diameter tubing to minimize foaming.* Just dial back the lever to provide more flow resistance in case of excess foaming during dispense. Like all Nukatap faucets, this is also forward sealing, to prevent the faucet body from drying out between pours.
Now resdesigned with a one piece ball lock shank, which eliminates the tendency of a keg faucet to swivel. The faucet cannot swivel as the splines on the ball lock shank hold it securely in position.
*Flow control is most valuable when you have an overcarbonated or agitated keg, which typically happens more with commercial kegs. If you are dispensing home brew you probably have control over the carbonation level, and the keg probably has not been shaken up by a trip to the liquor store, making flow control less valuable.
Nukatap Flow Control Keg Faucet
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NukaTap Faucets come in three variations. Stainless, Stealth (Matte Black) and Flow Control. All feature stainless steel construction, forward seal design and all the other NukaTap innovations.
I’m also linking to Intertap faucets and accessories where applicable because all Intertap spouts work with NukaTap
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