Lawrence Brewers Guild

I'm looking for some gas check valves...

I was force-carbing a keg 2 days ago and was also cleaning the rest of my kegs as well. When I went to push the StarSan from keg 1 to keg 2, I started smelling beer.
It turns out that when I hooked up the secondary gas line to the empty sanitized keg, the keg I was force-carbing (through the beer-out post) pushed beer through the gas line into the empty keg!

I know, simple physics... equalizing pressures... but I didn't think about it moving from one keg to another, only back into the tank when the tank pressure was below the keg pressure. I'm assuming that the regulator has a check valve on it to stop back flow as I would assume that to be 'standard equipment'.

So, back to my question:
Does anyone have a good cheap source for check valves?

I do plan on putting a manifold inside my fridge so I can gas several kegs at once and after what happened, I'm going to need a check valve for each of the beer lines so there is no equalization of pressures when one keg blows.

Any suggestions on this? Am I being too cautious now because of what happened? What do you guys do to keep similar incidents from happening?


And yes, I will clean and sanitize the gas lines, I just haven't done it yet.

I don't know about cheap but you should check McMaster Carr. You can at least get an idea of what is available.

And just because I'm the asshole I am; don't you want a liquid check valve? You want the gas to pass but no liquid. Right? So a manifold with a check valve in each gas port would stop any chance of liquid flowing back thru the manifold. Or have I COMPLETELY misunderstood the problem!?

Now that I went back and read the original post it sounds like you could use one check valve for the force CO station and if the rest are at the same pressure there should be no problem.

As you can tell I have nothing left to do today but overeat and overdrink. Turkey was done smoking at 10 am.

You might ask the shop you get your Co2 fill at...Never know they might be reasonable considering you don't have shipping.