Recent lessons learned

As I was getting ready to leave DC, I had a bunch of beer in kegs that I wanted to get rid of. There was no way it was going to store well over the summer, and it sure wasn't going to transport well back to Wisconsin. In my haste to get rid of the beer, I learned some good lessons:

1) Better to make sure your keg is empty before you try to fill it again.

I had a bunch of dudes over a month or more ago to drink beer, eat meat, and otherwise be dudely. I was serving homebrew from the 'rator, and at one point one guy came down and declared one of the kegs kicked. Sweet. No prob. Go to the auxillary. Fast forward a couple weeks to Graham getting ready for his going-away BBQ. I went to rack a modified Hoppy Husky IPA to the keg and lo! The keg still had about 2 gallons of beer in it. Balls. I needed to get the IPA in the keg so it would go away before I left, but I really didn't want to waste the brown that was in the keg. So I tried to bottle it. Long story short, you really can't bottle a carbonated beer sans a counterflow filler without three things: a) a huge mess and 2) really flat beer. So that sucked.

2) It takes longer to chill 5 gallons than one (i.e. me) might think.

Once I cleaned up the mess of the bottling fiasco, I had less than 24 hours for the beer to get cold and carbonate before the party. I thought I could get by with the kegerator turned up to the max and near-constant agitation to facilitate C02 dissolution. It worked ok. Thankfully, the IPA was really tasty, so I and others were willing to overlook a low carbonation : temperature ratio.