Big score on kegs!!!

Tonight I hit a big score on kegs. After Bryan - who started brewing with us last weekend - indicated he was wanted to skip bottling all together and go right into kegging because with an easy conversion he could have his kegerator serving homebrew. Because of his need for kegs and my getting close to full occupancy on my current keg supply, I decided to get out and start hunting kegs a little more seriously that I usually do.

I placed a "wanted" ad up on Craigslist offering $10-$15 per keg for soda kegs. Initially I considered trying to trade beer for kegs, but quickly realized that that was not kosher with ATF so halted that. I got a response in the first few days with someone offering 10 to 15 kegs if I was interested. I told him I would take 10 and he asked for $120. Shown below is what I got.



I really lucked out because these kegs were in very good shape. They all still had remnants of soda in them, but for $12 a piece that's what you get.

Tonight I cracked them all open and freed them of the sweet carbonated monster of soda. I started by dumping and rinsing each of them out, sure to keep like caps with one another (some get bent and only create a good seal with the keg they were bent with). After talking with Nick and doing a little research, I decided to give bleach a chance. I used 1.5 cups of bleach per 2 gallons of water on four of the kegs. The other six kegs I used one gallon of one step




My hope is to get a better idea of which is going to work better in the future. However, already bleach and I did not get off to a good start as I think I got some on my good jeans.

Per Nick's suggestion, I pressurized all of them with the cleaning solution in there and I am going to shake them up once or twice a day for the next few days. In the meantime I am going to get some gaskets for the nipples, but not the large cap for the top as I don't think those matter as much. When I get to changing the gaskets, I am going to take all of them apart and clean them out thoroughly.

***UPDATE - After the messages from Trout I went home and dumped all the bleach filled kegs. They were fine and all the soda smells were gone so no harm no foul. The ones that I used one-step with did not work. They still stunk of soda so I made up some of the beer line cleaning solution that I got from Ed a while back and used that for the six kegs that had the One-Step. It worked like a champ! All smells were gone and they are airing out as we speak. It makes the beer line cleaning solution the most desirable solution because it's quick (don't soak it over night because it's capable of stripping chrome and stainless) it's meant for drinking and it's not all that corrosive to the hands or clothes. Win win in my book.

This made for a good night - The bad news is that I think my mini-fridge finally died. I talked to my father and he has an old dorm fridge at the house they are not using that he said I could have so I will be onto other project, but old brown fridge will me missed...