What Does a Flow Control Faucet Do? – New Picnic Tap w/Flow Control
In order to properly serve a pint of beer from your kegerator you need to have a balanced system. You decide what carbonation level you’d like to serve and what temperature you want your beer to be and set a CO2 pressure based on those two factors. To pour a proper pint, well carbonated without excessive foam, you need to balance your system. Balancing offsets your set CO2 pressure with the proper amount of resistance. Not enough resistance = fast pouring and excessively foamy beers. Too much resistance = beer pours too slowly or not at all. Each component along the way provides some resistance. Typically most of the resistance comes in the form of adding more beer line. More line = more resistance. For a full rundown of this see: Step by Step Balancing Your Kegerator Draft System
What do flow control faucets do?
Flow control faucets feature a built in flow compensator that allows you to adjust the resistance your faucet is exerting. That means less tubing and potentially less foaming and wasted beer. The compensation feature also makes it easier to serve higher carbonation beers as you can set the faucet to provide resistance to offset the increased pressure needed to store and serve these beers at higher pressures. Instead of replacing your beer line with ever increasing lengths of tubing, you simply turn a knob to increase resistance.
In my opinion Intertap and Perlick are top faucet manufacturers and both have a flow control model.
