The Keggle Conundrum

A large number of posts on a number of forums promote the effectiveness of old beer kegs when converted to a number of brewing vessels, especially brew kettles. These sites all suggested tactics to acquire these kegs, ranging from the morally questionable to the, well, totally legit, to the unnecessarily expensive. The best sites also showed pictures and videos detailing keg converstion with the use of either a plasma torch or a Sawzall, a drill, and a welding rig. This thread on the homebrewtalk.com forum has good videos, and also leads the reader to other demonstrations of the "keggle" conversion technique.

I was led to believe by the authors of these posts that the hardest part about the keggle conversion process would be conning someone into welding a ball valve onto the damn thing. I was mistaken. Further research dropped me into a whimsical world built of stainless steel, where the rivers flowed with light beer and people in diapers made of Keystone Light cases and duct tape braved the currents in red plastic cups. These are the things I learned there:

1. Kegs are expensive. Sources varied, but the average quoted price was $150 per standard 15.5 gallon keg shell to the brewery. This means that when you appropriate a keg shell by eating the deposit after hosting a party, you are basically stealing. But who are you stealing from?

2. Liquor stores do not own the kegs they give you. The breweries do. This means that every keg that doesn't get returned loses over $100 worth of product for the brewery. This particular revelation may cause the anarchists in the crowd to decide that if beer (and therefore the keg) comes from a multinational macrobrewery, then they should make the effort to fuck the man and take what they must from the living room at the frat party/trunk of the car at the hockey game/loving embrace of the devotee passed out face down on the couch with his hand on the tap. Come on guys. This is weak. You drank that beer. You already get free product every day at 3 from Coors Lab. Take it to the man by contributing to developing your local economy or something.

If the keg came from a microbrewery, then don't steal it. Their profit margins are thin enough as it is, and if you take product from them, they have to work harder at being accountants and don't get to have fun and make delicious beer for you to drink.

3. Breweries don't have a lot of old kegs. I don't live in what we would call a beer-poor environment. This is Golden, Colorado for fuck's sake. I contacted every microbrewery I could think of in the Denver/Boulder area to see if they had any decommissioned kegs that I would be able to buy or take off their hands, and came up with the following responses:

From Jeff at Golden City Brewery: "Shannon, we don't have any decomissioned kegs. They can be hard to find. You should check kegs.com and also auction sites like ebay, craigslist. You could even check with some bigger micros that keg like Lefthand."

From Adam Avery, of Avery Brewing: "Shannon,
We do not have any kegs for sale and not sure where to get them. Maybe a
homebrew shop?"

From Patrick of Great Divide: "Hi Shannon, thanks for getting in touch. Unfortunately we can't sell any of our kegs here. Stomp Them Grapes, a homebrew shop in the Highlands might be able to help out. Sorry about that, let me know if you need anything else. See you
Friday! Cheers!"

and etc. ad nauseum and such on.

4. Kegs are also expensive to get secondhand. Romps through the jungle of online sales and auction got me an average price of about $80 for a cleaned, used keg shell. This is a bit more than I want to spend at this point, although this is much less than the $250 price tag for a 15 gallon, stainless steel brewpot without a valve or thermomether.

I called a few scrapyards, but didn't receive any calls back with positive results for kegs. I will call a few more, as I will be able to use as many of these as I can get my hands on to improve my system, but the prospects, they are not looking good. And yes, I called Coors. I think that we are still not on speaking terms.