American Beauty

The beer faucet.

Oh how I love thee, let me count the pints.

You are intuitively easy to use. A gentle pull is all it takes to turn you on--and a light push staunches your pouring elixir. And anyone can learn your ways in under 10 seconds. Oh! If all the complexities of life were as easy.

You are simple but not crude. One-dimensional but not simple minded! Unassuming by nature, rarely drawing attention, and your viscera hidden, only a certainty of performance is ever bared. While what flows from you receives all the glory, it is a lack of awareness that would deny your rightful import to this world.

You display elegance in every ounce of your slender form--your curves arousing the animal spirits from within like few things can. Dimensionally graceful, perfectly proportioned, clean in design. Extraneous decoration long since cast away.

You epitomize the height of achievement in Man's evolutionary thirst for beer.

Retrofitting New Faucets

You know the old metric versus standard conundrum?

Liters and quarts, millimeters and sixteenths, kilograms and pounds?

We thought we had pretty much settled that one back in the `70s, but that old beast of an irritation reared its ugly head again in of all places a retrofit of Perlick® faucets to our vintage German draft tower.

As it turns out the German tower shanks are close but no cigar to mating with the Perlick 425SSTF (model 425 stainless steel tarnish free) brass faucets.

The female knurls on the shank don't align quite right with those on the faucet and the screw thread pitch on the faucet is different from that of the faucet coupling nut.

So, what we were hoping to get away with: simply replacing the coupling nut and the polished brass outside flange, has now morphed into replacing the whole shank.

Times three.

Dang!