Since I’ve been training at home I’ve been incorporating a lot of strongman stuff into my workouts and am really enjoying it; my question is what size keg do I want to buy for strongman? Standard size? Is there a place where you can typically find these for sale?
Thanks ahead for any input.
Full size, which is about 15.5 gallons.
Gotta buy direct. Try beveragefactory. You can “acquire” kegs otherwise, but they aren’t sold at that point.
Finally, a strongman thread I’m qualified to offer advice on.
A keg might seem like a lot of beer until you realize that there’s only 165 of them in there.
Liquor stores will sell them to you full of beer with a mere $5 deposit for the keg itself. A good way to empty it is to light something big on fire and invite everyone you know over to watch it burn. Charge 'em $5 a cup if you’re cheap, otherwise ask them to bring a food of some kind, hard liquor, loose women or anything else to help you reach your goal of acquiring an empty keg to train for strongman.
Don’t forget to social distance!
It is worth noting (and I use an analogy here you are old enough to get) that this is like renting a movie at Blockbuster and never returning it and just paying the fine.
You have the product. Money exchanged hands. But no sale occurred. Blockbuster still owns the movie.
It’s not a big deal, but if we get into what is technically legal, it gets sticky.
They get defective ones, call up the local distributors and ask around. Go by the local grocery store in the morning when the vendors are making deliveries and ask. The driver probably doesn’t know, but can give you a phone number for someone that does.
I never realized a keg deposit is different than, say, a can deposit. $5 deposit on the keg, $0.05 deposit on the can. I can keep it and not get a deposit back, or return it and get my deposit back.
I’ve never looked into it, but is there force of law behind keg deposits that doesn’t exist with other sizes of beverage containers?
When you factor in how much a keg actually costs (about $125 new) it makes a bit more sense. The deposit is more to disincentize theft.
And in the same way, Coca Cola doesn’t sell aluminum: they sell Coca Cola. You don’t actually buy the can from them, but the soda in the can. My understanding is that is why the deposit is a thing in the first place. Also why you can probably get pinched trying to sell your cans vs recycle them, if someone REALLY wants to set up that sting, haha.
Except they do sell aluminum packaging and, having worked in the beverage industry, it most definitely factors into cost of goods sold calculations. I worked in bottled water when a bunch of different New England states decided to adopt different deposit laws for bottled water, which caused the kind of production planning nightmare I like to solve. All of a sudden we had to figure out which state with which deposit laws our product was destined for, and ensure that the correct labels were applied at time of production. Easier said than done in a world of large-scale regional product distribution and production runs on massive scales.
Regardless, there was no level of production or financial planning that assumed those deposits were anything other than packaging expenses that I was aware of. Money that came back was tracked, but not planned on as a reliable stream of funds.
The only laws I know of governing can deposits involve interstate transfer of empties. For instance, I would be committing a crime if I took my embarrassingly large pile of quarantine empties to Michigan, where I could attempt to redeem a $0.10 per can deposit. There have, in fact, been sting operations and arrests made for this type of activity. Great news articles when it happens.
I suppose that brings me to the ethical considerations I didn’t even ponder until you had to rain on my brilliant plan. Even if it is technically legal, it may not be a good faith business transaction to acquire a keg in the fun and rewarding way I’ve described.
Putting my BA hat on, I could imagine brewers managing kegs as assets, not as sunk cost packaging materials. That would make a lot more sense if they do, indeed, cost upwards of $100 to manufacture.
Well darn, I learned something, haha.
I got my legal degree from Lionel Hutz, so I don’t pretend to be the expert. This is just what has been explained to me in the strongman community when I tried to buy a keg the first time and found it impossible.
Well take it with a grain of salt. I’m assuming that aluminium packaging has the same force of law and production and financial planning considerations that plastic packaging has when it comes to bottle deposits.
In which case, it’s part of what you’re buying and the packaging is yours, unless you decide to take someone up on their offer to give you $x.xx for it.
I mean, here I thought I was qualified to give advice on how to get an emtpy beer keg and now I’ve found myself going down the rabbit hole of keg deposit ethics.
Maybe we won’t shoot the next one full of holes.
As a non-drinker, I learned SO much about alcohol sales in my quest to find a keg, haha.
That’s impressive, but think of how much you’d be able to forget if you started out on a quest to empty beer kegs.
I got retired bungside kegs for 25 bucks, 1 was the full size, one was a pony keg (5 gal?)
I filled them with water. My big keg is only partially full, but I stopped filling once it hit the 100lbs mark. My pony keg is 50lbs, also partially filled.
They’re more retro-looking and don’t have that deep lips on the ends, and no handles like modern kegs do at the top. I use these for carries, but I wouldnt do swings or OHP with these.