New Kegerator Regulator

As you may recall from much earlier posts, the battle to get CO2 for the kegerator was a challenge since the Japanese won't fill a US bottle with CO2 and a US regulator won't fit directly on a Japanese CO2 bottle. The solution was a Japanese regulator graciously given to me by a local bar owner. As you can see, the regulator doesn't have any gages. US regulators usually have two gages, one to see what the pressure in the bottle is to tell you when it is getting empty and the other to see what pressure you are delivering to the keg. I probably could live without the delivery pressure gage since you tend to tweak that in based on how the beer is coming out, but I really wanted a bottle pressure gage so I could predict when the bottle was going to run out and make sure it didn't do so during a party.

So, I bought a US regulator and hemmed and hawed on how I would get it to work on the Japanese bottle. I finally took some measurements and realized that the only difference was the large nut that attaches to the bottle since the stem diameter was identical. I disassembled both regulator supply stems, swapped nuts, and put the US regulator on. I was so happy to be able to finally see what the bottle pressure was.

Since the regulator is a bit bigger, it took some moving around to figure how it could remain visible, yet not be in the way. I ended up turning the bottle 180 degrees around. This morning, I noticed that on this other side of the bottle, (that I apparently never looked closely at) is a built in bottle level gage! (See the blue and red gage with the yellow indicator built into the bottle valve assembly.) So, I guess all I really gained by this whole evolution was to get a locking regulator. Caroline and I laughed for quite a while on this one. I need to do a better job of searching out the Japanese solution before trying to squeeze a US solution onto the problem. :)