Keg-to-keg transfer with a Bouncer

This came to us as a question on Amazon from a customer. Here’s the question:

Is there a version with a smaller barb? I’d love to use this as a filter when jumping from keg-to-keg.

I’m not sure of the exact purpose was behind this question, but here are a few things I can think of:

• you have a really trashy beer in a secondary ferment in a keg
• you dry hopped in the secondary in a keg
• you put a bunch of flavoring stuff in secondary ferment in a keg, e.g. raisins, cocoa nibs, coffee, vanilla beans, citrus peels

Whatever the reason, it would be really helpful to be able to quickly filter when transferring from keg to keg.

However, the standard barb on a ball-lock or pin-lock keg quick disconnect is 1/4″. This fits standard beer tubing. But the Bouncer has a 3/8″ barb. So how do you make this work? See the image below.

You can get a threaded keg quick disconnect on which you can put a 5/16″ barb, which fits siphon tubing, which fits the 3/8″ barb on the Bouncer. The 5/16″ barb is not super-tight, but this tubing is not under (much) pressure, so should work fine. If not, a hose clamp would make it work.

This would certainly work under CO2 pressure. However, I believe it would also work gravity-fed. If the source keg is entirely about the target keg, and you could get the siphon started, and you let air into the source keg, this would siphon fine. Elevating the source keg might be a good idea even with the CO2 pressure, since you’d only need to add enough pressure to get the siphon started, and to replace the beer as it flows out.

By the way, threaded disconnects are pretty handy, and might be a good upgrade for your kegerator regardless. It can make line cleaning and replacing a little easier. In my case, I wanted to be able to easily put a commercial keg coupler in place of my disconnect – threaded disconnects were the easy answer.

Here’s a customer picture of their keg-to-keg transfer with the Bouncer: