A friend of mine has a kegerator.
If I got him a keg as a gift, is it fine to have it sit around untapped for a month or so while he finishes the current keg?
It should be okay as long as it’s refrigerated.
That might be an issue. The only room he has to refrigerate it is the fridge with the keg already in it.
Untapped, I’d not worry about it. I’d not let it get hot, but room temperature/cellar temperatures would be just fine. Light is beer’s greatest enemy, not minor changes in temperature.
I’m also hoping such a gift is not a megabrewed light lager.
That’s what he normally drinks, and it would not go unappreciated, believe me.
But, I was thinking Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He likes that a lot, too.
Pay for the keg and give him a card saying he can pick it up at Joe’s Liquor whenever he empties his current keg. That way your buddy gets fresh beer. Sierra Nevada shouldn’t sit around waiting to be served. It’s a sin, it is!
Kegged beer is often (dare I say almost never?) pasteurized. It’s part of the appeal, part of the difference in taste. Don’t let it sit around without refrigeration!
So yeah, it needs to be chilled.
I have a kegerator. Will you be my friend? 
You meant to say ‘often not pasteurized’
D’oh! :smack:
How do you know he didn’t mean often passedyoureyes
Thanks.
I guess it might be good to give him a “gift cert” or something.
An appropriate time for this question-some years ago you would need a different tap depending on the brewer.Has everyone ( in the U.S.) switched to the ball lock or are other systems extant?
Having worked in a bar and thrown many a rugby party, I can say that just about the only beer I’ve seen that uses a different tap is Guinness, and that’s because it’s nitrogenated instead of pressurized by carbon dioxide.
All the big US/Canadian/Mexican brands are sankey. I don’t get the European stuff because they use different tappers. The microbreweries are mostly offering ball-lock Cornelius connectors hereabouts, which works for me. Of course they’re not full half-barrels, which is great for fitting into my fridge with the 1/2 or 1/4.
That wouldn’t make sense in the context of my parenthetical indicating “almost never” coupled with my plea to refrigerate it!
Looks like, as Balthisar pointed out, that European beers use a Sankey S connector, while North American breweries use a Sankey D. I’ve tapped at least one hundred Newcastle kegs, and never noticed it was a different tap because their actions are so similar. Nitrogenated beers use an English U System connector.
When I was brewing a lot of ale (and kegging most of it), I just kept my kegs in a reasonably cool room, where the temperature was usually in the 60’s. I never had a problem. A month isn’t a problem.
Light isn’t an issue, because kegs are opaque, but you obviously want to keep it out of direct sunlight because of the heat.
At one point, most of the homebrewers were using soda kegs with pin-lock attachments and the commercial brewers were using ball-lock. Almost everybody has switched now, but, but I have two sets of taps and both types of kegs.
[Nitpick]That’s Anheuser-Busch, and their products are lagers. He’s talking about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which is…well…ale. It is brewed, stored, and served at higher temperatures than lagers.
InvisibleWombat, because they’re the same fridge, I necessarily have to drink my own ales at lager temperatures.
I have no trouble keeping my own, hand crafted good outside of the fridge for a while, despite its not being pasteurized, but I know where it’s been during every step of its production, i.e., its sanitized. I don’t know that the same is necessarily true of commercial kegs, though, else they’d not bother to pasteurize their bottle products, and wouldn’t recommend storage temperatures.
For everyone else, for what it’s worth, you don’t have to worry about getting sick if it spoils; the bad guys can’t handle the beer. But you might get some funny tasting critters and some mold. Or it they’re as sanitary as InvisibleWombat suggests, it’ll be perfectly fine. By non-sanitary, I don’t mean in the restaurant sense, like it’s loaded with filth or anything, by the way!
As someone who routinely buys kegs of the aforementioned beer (I live in Chico and it’s cheaper than water here), I have never noticed any depreciation in quality if the keg is used within the a reasonable amount of time.
As a homebrewer, my keg beer stays about as fresh for about as long as my bottled beer without refrigeration, but this excludes most lagers since they are (usually) cold fermented.
Sorry about all the (parenthetical) statements