So after a lot of deliberation I decided not to purchase the keg system that I posted for your guys opinions on. I just don’t want to deal with commercial kegs. I actually might know someone that has soda keg.
My question is where did you guys purchase your systems. Where are the best deals? Did most of you guys luckily stumble upon good deals or did you just piece them together?
I got my first set up from “the competitor”. my old LHBS had a bunch of cornies. got a bunch from them. I’d check out our host & your local soda/pop distributor.
My first things came from Midwest and just kept growing and growing and well you know the rest.
Just keep your eyes open for good deals they are out there, garage sales, craigslist friends that know people that are getting out of brewing.
Boy credit cards are sure easy to use hand them plastic load up the car.
[quote=“chuck”]
Boy credit cards are sure easy to use hand them plastic load up the car.[/quote]
tooooooo easy.
About that gear in your other post, I think you had a good deal for the price you mentioned. Many pieces are usable with the soda kegs. And the commercial sanke taper is useful if you ever want to purchase a keg of commercial beer. Or a friend buys a commercial keg for a party, you can set him up for dispensing.
You don’t need to keg your beer in a commercial keg. You can convert it easily back and froth from soda to sanke kegs.
As far as where to get soda kegs? you have the normal outsets. NB, MW, kegs.com, micromatics, beverage factory, ebay, craigslist.
I originally bought a setup through my LHBS and purchased most of my cornies years ago for around $18 each. I have pieced together both of my current systems from random CL and Ebay finds. And I purchased my Perlicks new. As mentioned before, I have found the key to scoring great deals on CL is doing random searches for odd key words that most brewers would not use. I have found many tanks, regs, and manifolds at a great price this way.
If you want to buy all new, KegConnection has customizable setups which come partially assembled which is nice if you don’t want to buy the tool to do the ear clamps yourself. In terms of new equipment, they tend to be the most consistently cheap and I stand by the quality of their products.
With shipping, if you are going to have something shipped to an address other than the billing address, best to place an order online and then call them to ensure that they have the shipping address, this has been an issue in the past that has taken some time and yelling to get resolved.
Oh man. I wish I knew about this site yesterday when I ordered a 2 keg kit from MidWest. I think I got a fair deal with 10% off, but I may be building out the rest of my setup from these guys. Planning to build out a 6 tap keezer.
Do they have good order turnaround times and good customer service?
Turnaround times are pretty average. Historically, I have been extremely happy with their customer service. They shipped my last order to the billing address as opposed to the shipping address and someone stole it off my porch while I was at work. They did resolve it and send me out a replacement but it took some yelling and some time.
The service is great though in custom orders and questions. Email them or call up and they will assemble whatever you want and send you a quote.
Check out Chico Company. http://www.chicompany.net
Lots of good gear at reasonable prices. I think the kegs have to be purchased in bulk. So skip that. But their other gear is reasonably priced. I pieced my gear together over the years from various sources. Ebay is where I got most of my soda kegs. I started with a single pin lock keg because they were out of ball lock. So everything has been pinlock.
One thing I’m glad I did was put female swivel nut fittings on my lines so I could switch between Soda QDs and Sanke couplings modified with MFL fittings easily.
