We knew our last keg was going to kick soon, so I called our local beer store to see what kegs they had in stock.  They were out of our first choice, so I found myself talking my wife into getting a keg of Big Nose IPA.

Now, saying that I’m not an IPA fan is a bit of an understatement.  I generally compare IPAs to sandpaper, bleach, or some kind of tongue-stripping assault.  But for whatever reason, I really like Big Nose.  It’s not really pale (more of an amber, in fact), so maybe there’s enough malt in it that I don’t mind the hops so much.  And I think, as the name suggests, that they’ve focused on the aromatic hops, not so much the tongue-violence-bittering hops.

Anyway, in goes the new keg, and the hissing sound I normally expect when tapping a new keg doesn’t stop — it just tapers off to a steady hiss.  So I turned everything off, pulled the release valve on the keg, and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  I’d loosened the CO2 line on the keg coupler, so I retightened that, retapped the keg and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  It was dinnertime by now, so I let it sit, rechecked everything and turned the CO2 back on — still hissing.

By now, I was getting pretty frustrated and starting to worry that my regulator was broken.  So I ran my fingers around all the seals in the regulator, and found the problem: the regulator wasn’t screwed in to the CO2 cylinder securely (maybe it got bumped?).  So I tightened that and the hissing stopped.  So, score one for the check-everything-twice school of troubleshooting.