Draught Operations > Preparation to Pour > Cold Storage and Proper Chilling of Kegs before Serving

To ensure fresh flavor and ease of dispense, draught beer should remain at or slightly below 38°F throughout distribution, warehousing and delivery. Brewers and distributors use refrigerated storage for draught beer. In warm climates or long routes, they may also use insulating blankets or refrigerated delivery trucks to minimize temperature increases during shipping.

At retail, even a few degrees increase above the ideal maximum of 38°F can create pouring problems, especially excessive foaming.  Ideally all draught beer delivered to retail will be stored cold until served.

Accounts that lack cold storage for their entire inventory of draught beer should allow adequate chilling time for recently refrigerated kegs in order to avoid dispense problems.  In a similar vein, recently arrived kegs should be allowed adequate chilling time as they usually warm to some degree during delivery.  In order to avoid dispense problems, every keg must be at or below 38°F while being served.

To help ensure that your kegs are properly chilled before serving, Chart 1 below provides a guide to the time needed to properly chill a keg to 38°F from a given starting temperature.  Note that even kegs that “feel cold” (e.g., 44°F) may need to chill overnight in order to ensure proper dispense.

Chart 2 shows how quickly a keg will warm up when exposed to temperatures above 38°F.  From this you can see that a keg that warmed up just a little bit during delivery—from 38° to 44°F—would need to be in the cooler for a full 18 hours before reaching serving temperature.

Chart 1

Chart 2

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