First beer milky from one tap

[georage]

Perhaps someone else here has had this happen to them.

I have a 2-tap kegerator. The left tap pours fine. The right tap pours an unholy mixture of suspended milky white crud that is supposed to be beer but tastes and smells horrible.

If I pour a second beer, it tastes better. The third beer is clear and yummy.

The next day, I am back to a milky gross beer.

I guess I have a wild yeast colony living in my beer lines?

Is that a good guess? How would you kill it/fix it? I am considering running napalm through the lines.

Thanks for any tips, I just got the kegerator a few months ago, and after every keg I dismantle them and soak in Star San for hours before filling with new beer. Is there something else I should be doing?

Kind regards,
George

[kcbeersnob]

Sounds like you’ve got a beer with a lot of suspended yeast (and maybe hop particles if heavily dry hopped with pellets) that’s taking a long time to clear. I had a beer that performed similarly recently. It took 3 weeks in the keezer for the milkiness to disappear.

[wahoo]

I really doubt it’s in your lines, but i suppose it’s possible.

[westcoastbrewer]

Did you by any chance move the keg before you poured your pints? A good deal of yeast will settle on the floor of the keg and if it gets shifted around it can stir the yeast back up. Typically my first few pints from a new keg will be a little cloudy until my line clears.

[silentknyght]

Have you disassembled the taps, themselves, for thorough cleaning? Also, when you clean the lines, you’ll want to use something other than only starsan (a sanitizer), like a PBW or other cleaner.

Also, a relatively cheap & quick check would be to hook up the keg in question to the beer line & faucet that has no issue. If that solves the problem for the keg, then it may be easier to spend $10 on brand new beer line and just ditch the old instead of trying to save it.

Edit: a quick google suggests that yeast-contaminated beer line may exhibit some brown-ish staining, visible when shining a flashlight through the line. Maybe something else to check?

[georage]

Thanks for the tips. I put some boiling bleach water in a keg and ran the hot water through the lines, and left it for a few hours. I rinsed out the keg immediately (because bleach kills stainless) and later flushed the lines with pure water.

It was definitely an infection in the line. It would make whatever small amount of beer was in the line between the keg and the tap get really scary looking.

I will have to be more mindful of cleaning the taps and lines.

[brewingdan]

Me personally, I’d replace that line. Tubing is cheap.