Review: Growlerwerks Stainless Steel uKeg

As a long-time beer drinker, the growler—a big beer transportation vessel, usually made of glass—has always befuddled me. Few objects in beerdom inspire such fanatical devotion, but it is a singularly impractical device.

Yes, a glass growler is a great souvenir from a brewery. It's endlessly reusable, and often it's the only way to transport brewery-only releases that aren’t otherwise packaged or distributed. But simple growlers usually aren’t insulated, and the cap releases the beer’s carbonation. Many times, I’ve filled a growler, brought it home in a cooler, and put it in the fridge, only to find the beer flat and flavorless within hours.

So when Growlerwerks released a metal, vacuum-insulated, pressurized growler with a locking tap, it caused quite a stir. The uKeg is exactly what it sounds like—a tiny, portable, mini keg. This was my first chance to try one.

The 64-ounce uKeg in brushed stainless steel, with its gleaming brass fittings, is a beautiful object. When I brought it to a pub, it made everyone sitting at the bar turn and stare. Someone even followed me out to ask questions about it.

Like a regular growler, you wash it by rinsing the parts with hot water and turning it upside down to dry. The sight glass only displays up to three 16-ounce pints, but there’s an interior embossed fill line to make sure that you don't overfill it.

The uKeg’s real innovation, however, is its pressurized cap. Turn the cap to the off position, drop an 8-gram carbon dioxide cartridge into the sleeve, and screw it shut. After you’ve filled the growler, make sure that the tap is locked. Screw the cap onto the growler and slowly pressurize until the built-in pressure gauge reflects the appropriate PSI (pounds per square inch).

Growlerwerks provides a table of standard PSI for different styles of beer. For example, a stout or a cream ale requires a lot less pressure than a crisp lager. However, for reasons that I explain later, I pressurized a uKeg of kolsch at a lot lower than the recommended 12-15 PSI.

While the uKeg also comes in a 128-ounce size, I liked the 64-ounce size better. 64 ounces is by far the most popular growler size. It fits in every cooler I own, and at 10.9 inches tall, it fits perfectly in the bottom shelf of my fridge. The two beer-enjoying members of my household found that four or five glasses of beer was plenty to last for several days, although the uKeg can keep beer carbonated for up to two weeks.

The uKeg is advertised as the perfect camping companion. Camping is, by far, my most common growler use-case scenario—it’s convenient to stop by a brewery on your way out of town—but as with a regular keg, you can’t just park a uKeg on a picnic table in 90-degree heat and expect to pour great beer.

It doesn’t insulate particularly well, and rising temperatures can make the CO2 expand. When I left the uKeg on a table for a few hours in 80-degree ambient temperatures, the pressure gauge warned me that the pressure was rising to dangerous levels.

Since the uKeg is made from stainless steel and not glass, I wasn’t worried about it exploding and getting shards of broken glass in my eye. But it did make my beer warm and unbearably foamy. Pouring foam off a pint pulled from a keg is an acceptable waste, but pouring foam off a miniscule four-pint container is not. I put it in the fridge to calm down for a bit.

Like most kegs, the uKeg can be a leaky little jerk. There’s a reason most brewers work with the larger versions in rooms that have concrete floors with built-in drains. Even if you tighten the cap nut with a butter knife and jiggle every component four or five times to make sure it’s sealed, it can still spray or dribble when you least expect it. Carry a towel, just in case. Your car's interior will thank you.

Each carbon dioxide cartridge pressurizes just one uKeg’s worth of beer. Since the replacement cartridges cost $12 for ten, this is an additional cost on top of an already-expensive product.

And finally, cleaning the tap line is also annoying. You have to fill the uKeg with water and a little baking soda, charge it briefly with the CO2 cartridge, and run water through the tapline instead. If you want to remove it, you need a tool, time, and a lot of patience. Given that bacteria can grossly affect a beer’s taste, it was a little unnerving to see moisture remaining in the sight glass even after I’d let it dry. However, I haven’t yet noticed it affecting the beer’s taste.

While the uKeg is definitely more expensive and requires more maintenance than the average growler, it’s also much more useful.

Here in Portland, Oregon, there's a lot of great beer that’s only available at the brewery or at select pubs. We have an assortment of growlers, but of those, I only use the half-growlers. My husband and I just weren’t able to consume 64 ounces of beer before it went flat.

Since many campsites and outdoor festivals specifically prohibit glass containers, the uKeg would be a very useful addition to your arsenal of camping equipment, even if you have to keep it in your cooler.

And you don't even have to go camping to enjoy it! It is such a luxurious, civilized thing to do, to open the fridge and help myself to a leisurely pint of Upright’s Saison Vert or Breakside’s Rainbows & Unicorns whenever I felt like it. It’s definitely worth the embarrassment of dribbling beer all over the bar when I get it filled up.

Correction appended: 5/2/2018, 10:00 am PDT: A previous version of this article stated that you can't remove the growler's sight glass. You can.