Funky Beer is not as good as Funky Music

...I'm just sayin.

I've been having some trouble with my kegerator. Clean everything out. Keg a new beer. Put it in the kegerator. Drink it. Tastes gooooood!

Wait a few days. (Attempt) to have another beer. Tap sticks, beer is foamy. Tastes baaaaaaad.

Fill a keg with cleaning solution. Hook it up to the beer-out lines. Run solution through the lines until the keg is empty, and then hook them back up to the beer filled keg.

Pull a beer. Drink it. Tastes good again.

I'm assuming there is something growing in the tap between pulls. I, not living in a bar, don't have near-constant usage of my taps - nor am I likely to, despite my love of a good beer. I am willing to bet that the beer drying inside the mouth of the tap is making a perfect playground for some funky critters. It's definitely gumming up the works and making the tap harder to open, which leads to foamy beer. I need to find some way of keeping the tap clean between tastings.

Some advice I've found online mentions using forward-seal taps. The idea with these is to seal off all the beer inside the lines, so there's nothing to drip out, dry up and grow little critters. I will be ordering one of these in a week or so (but at around $40, I gotta wait for payday) and will try it and report back. Look here for updates later.

Another suggestion is to clean out the beer works more thoroughly - take apart the entire tap and clean everything out between beers. The idea here is to get anything that might be leftover in the crevices after running the cleaning solution though the lines between kegs. I have less hope for this, but it is an easy try. Since things seem like they are going bad between pulls, even from fresh, clean equipment, there might be something to it.

I'm also going to try cleaning out the tap after each pull. Dunking the tap in a glass of water to rinse off the beer seems like it would remove the environment that contributes to the stickiness, at the very least, and potentially remove anything for the critters to grow in. I have no anectdotal evidence that this will work, however. Either no one has ever tried it (which I doubt) or it's never worked (which I suspect).

Another suggestion is to use a tap plug. I guess the idea here is to prevent funky stuff floating around in the air outside the tap from getting inside and growing. Sounds like a good idea, but I don't fully trust the theory. The plug will be waved around in the self-same air when I get a beer, and then just re-inserted into the tap when I'm done - I assume introducing the funky bugs right back in. If nothing else works, I'll give this a try, but I'm not sure it will come to anything.

Along the same lines, I think, would be placing some kind of hood (or plastic sandwich bag, maybe?) over the tap when it's not in use. I don't think that would protect 100%, but maybe it will prevent infection introduced by contact with the taps - like that of a dog licking up the dripping beer after a pull. I have never seen said dogs do such a thing, but I am not truly certain that they don't, either. And since plastic sandwich bags exist in abundance at my house, and tap plugs do not, I believe I shall try the bags instead.

Finally, a more preventative measure: shorten the tap lines. I got my kegerator kit fully assembled. This required the seller to supply tap lines that were extra long to make sure they would work with whatever situation I planned to use them in. As it turns out, I only need about a foot and a half total to connect the kegs to the taps on the door of the fridge. All that extra space is just storing beer to go flat in the lines. I'm going to shorten the lines and make sure less beer is exposed to the extra-keg world with each pull. This will, at the very least, save me a few ounces of throwaway beer at the first pull of the night. I don't know if it will help with the nasty taste, but it'll leave less flat beer to be poured, and that's a win in my book.

I will report back shortly. For now, I have a brand new keg, delivered today, that I can use to re-clean the lines. And when that's done, a German Alt that is finished fermenting and waiting for a good home. Looks like a match made in heaven.