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.
Brewer’s Edge Micro Regulator
A lot of people migrate from bottling to kegging over time. The common reason cited by most of us is the extra hassle involved with the bottling process and cleaning/sanitizing bottles. But there are a few additional reasons I look back on bottling in the past tense. For example, when you have “1” keg of something, it sounds lonely and feels like it needs a companion. This logic then leads you to grow to having 2 or 3 different beers hanging around at one time. This sounds very practical when you say “3 beers”, but if you open up your beer fridge and have 100+ bottles of beer you look like you have a problem. Another one I learned was that although having to dump out a batch of lackluster beer is sad in any occasion, it’s much more sad to open 20+ bottles and pour them down the drain rather than pop the top on one keg.
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Even though kegging has its advantages, one notable downside is it makes it a lot more difficult to share your homebrew. There’s some good gear out there like pressurized growlers, bottle fillers, and equipment to mobilize your keg. But if you’ve ever brought a keg with you to a party, you know CO2 is a challenge. Disassembling your kegerator to lug a 5 # CO2 tank and its hoses around isn’t practical. So there are a number of options out there that make use of small 16 gram (and some up to 74 gram) CO2 cartridges.
There are simple ones that just have a trigger and you shoot a small burst of CO2 into your keg from time to time. These are OK, but you find yourself babysitting the keg all night because they’re not intuitive to the rest of the party-goers and you typically have people telling you that you’re out of beer when it just needs a trigger shot. So the better bet are the ones with a built-in pressure regulator where you can set a serving pressure and leave it (until you really run out of CO2).
Brewer’s Edge has a micro regulator that comes with an adjustable pressure knob, and a female fitting to allow you to screw in a standard gas quick-connect. It accommodates the typical 16 gram CO2 cartridge but also allows you to change out your adaptor and attach the big daddy 74 gram CO2 cartridge. It has a dial that allows you to set and leave a pressure from 0 – 30 psi, and let the regulator do its job of bleeding in more CO2 as needed as beer is drank out of the keg while you go worry about something else.
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