My beer engine is the best impulse purchase I have ever made. It changes good home-made beer into great home-made beer and allows me to serve beer to my guests that is pretty close to what they’d get in a British (northern) pub. I love it.
Last Wednesday it was giving me a bit of jip though. I did manage to get beer out of it, but is was hugely foamed up, so you only got about half a pint of froth.
This weekend Andy and I took it apart to see if some TLC would sort out the problem.
At this point it may be worth you having a look back at my previous post called Anatomy of a Beer Engine. This shows the insides of my beer engine last time I took it apart. This post is, incidentally, the most popular post on this blog!
So Andy and I took it apart on Friday and cleaned everything and put it back together. At this stage it became apparent that we’d made it worse – there was absolutely no draw at all. Andy’s calm and unflappable nature prevailed… so rather than getting stressed for the whole evening over it we put it back together and sat down and had a beer (bottled of course) to think it over.
Today I had another go at it and it seems to be working OK now. The problem? Well, there is a non-return valve at the bottom of the cylinder which I think had seized up. It’s the fat white cylinder with the input nozzle shown below:
It comes apart like this:
The beer is drawn in through the nozzle, through the valve inside, and out through the hole in the white plastic unit and thence into the bottom of the pump cylinder (the stainless steel bit).
Last time I took the engine apart I didn’t disassemble the non-return valve. Today, in desperation, I took it all apart.
Like everything about this beer engine, it’s elegant in its simplicity.
In the back of the nozzle section (the bit that is unscrewed) is a small movable piece (with the red ring) that is pushed in place by a long spring.
As you pull the beer engine handle it draws the piston up the cylinder, which reduces the pressure in the lower part of the cylinder. This pulls the moveable piece out a bit, allowing beer to be drawn into the engine cylinder. When you stop pulling, the spring pushes the piece back in to prevent beer returning back up the pipe. Dead simple.
As you can see, it was a bit dirty. I think grime on the red seal had caused it to stick in place.
Once it was all taken apart, cleaned with a toothbrush and then put back together the beer engine seems to be back to full working order.
I’ve not actually tried it with beer yet, but it now draws water just fine.
In other news: Remember I posted recently about The Grainfather? Well on seeing my post my mate Andy (the other Andy, not the Cheshire Peaks Andy) went straight out and ordered one. I’ll be very interested to hear how he gets on with it. If I can get some photos it may make an interesting post for the future.
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