This Fire Extinguisher Serves Frothy Beverages

[Ben Krasnow’s] friends always want him to bring a fire extinguisher to their parties, not for safety reasons, but to quench their thirst. You see, [Ben] uses old fire extinguishers as kegs for his home-brewed beer. They’re not all that different from the Cornelius kegs that most home brew setups use; they’re intended to dispense liquids under pressure, include a liquid exhaust valve, and a gas pressure valve. All he had to do was clean the stainless steel parts extremely well, replace the gaskets, and modify the input valve to use a quick connect for his CO2 system. For good measure he also added a low pressure meter to let you know the carbonation level.

Recently, he installed a home tap system that uses two of the extinguisher kegs. Our favorite part is the refrigerated hose loop that uses a fan to circulate cold air from the fridge all the way to taps.

16 thoughts on “This Fire Extinguisher Serves Frothy Beverages

  1. Avrpunk is right. Almost all solder except the new rhos garbage has at least small amounts of lead and the soldered copper fire extinguishers are no exception.

    Old copper fire extinguishers might very well have lead in them.

    As to whether or not drinking a few cups of beer will cause any harm is another matter. Getting your hands on a copper fire extinguisher would be a fairly expensive proposition as well.

  2. avrpunk, it states in the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph it is made of stainless which is probably one of his main choices for using it. As far as copper soldered with lead hurting you thats up for debate, for a long time all house plumbing was copper soldered with lead based solder.

  3. Way to go Ben!

    The extinguishers are indeed entirely stainless. They were sort of dirty inside because they’d been sitting outside at a metal yard for who knows how long.

    Most of the extinguishers do not have a large enough top to actually reach in and clean them out, so if you’re thinking of doing this yourself, look for the ones with a large cap…

  4. ive been planing on doing this for awhile just waiting for our new extinguishers to get in at station but as for the people worried about cleaning them out just pour in a 10% bleach water mix with some stainless steel ball bearings and shake it up the ball bearings will knock anything stuck to the inside loose and bleach will kill anything but when you rinse it our be sure to use the cleanest water you can. oh and don’t pressurize it over 100 psi iv seen threads on one fail because someone wanted to try it at 140psi

  5. Think that fire extinguisher container (empty) used to be a container of toxic chemicals for extinguishing fire. If you recycle the scrap into food container, that would mean something negative to your health. You did what is good for the environment, I salute! It would be good to have the container in the garden for watering plants.

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