So I’m looking to serve cask ale at home and got myself the Angram hand pump beer engine.
I realized however that to be able to push a minimal amount of CO2 each time I serve (instead of air which would oxidize the beer pretty quickly), I would need some sort of “Cask breather” or pressure regulator to avoid continuous flow of beer.
I was wondering if anyone had any experience with hand pump beer engines and if you know how to get one of those pressure regulator.
Hi, we’ve brewed and served a few cask ales in the last year or so. We also started using our new Hand-pump to serve beer during IronAler this year. Those pumps are made and designed to do gravity serving (British would say it’s proposterous to apply CO2 to that setup 
). I assume you want to plug CO2 in so that you can serve the beer for more than 24-48H, in that case you are right and will need a cask breather. From what I’ve researched so far, you can only import those from UK companies.
I would add to @ergau43’s comment: do not hesitate to ask brewpubs around how they do it. Obviously, they will typically empty their casks faster than you but they may still have a particular way to set it up.
Off the top of my head, these breweries in the Montréal area have beer engines at their bar:
Good luck, and make sure to report back!
By curiosity, where did you buy your beer engine?
Nous, on a commandé le beer engine via Keg Works
C’était superbe comme service à IronAler 
I’ve been using a handpump at home for over 20 years. Here’s what I’ve found from trial and error.
A cask breather not only allows CO2 into the cask at atmospheric pressure, it also rejects any CO2 it gets fed that is higher than 5psi. In fact, sending too much CO2 to the breather could damager the bladder.
I found this out when I was going through a lot more CO2 than I figured I should with my regulator set at 10psi.
The solution was to put a smaller regulator set at 2-5psi and a small ball valve feeding the cask breather as an extra measure.
Just before pulling a pint, I open the ball valve, serve the beer then close the ball valve. This seems to maximize my CO2 consumption and the life of the beer.
You might want to try the ball valve solution without a cask breather just to see how well it works. Keep in mind if the cask/keg gets too much pressure, your handpump will leak/drip.
I use 10L corny kegs and those lids are designed to keep pressure in, not pressure out. So, when pulling a pint, you might be pulling in a bit of air around the O ring of the lid.
You’ll find the beer will “evolve” over time depending on how long the keg lasts.
The other issue I found was when my handpump was clamped to a counter or something not refrigerated, the first pint pulled was warm since the cylinder was full of room temperature beer. Depending on the size of your handpump, that would be either a ¼ pint of a ½ pint.
My latest setup has the whole backside of the handpump refrigerated inside a mini fridge.
Let me know if you have questions. I have pictures of that build too if you want to see what I did.
Denis
Thanks for the answers!
Yeah I bought mine on BrewHq. It looks like it’s the same as the one on Keg Works.
The only place I’ve seen that sells the cask breather is BrewHq, however it seems to be on back order for the last couple of months.
I’ll try to contact some of the brewpubs see if they have any ideas.
In the meantime, I really like the ball valve idea, I’ll likely try something along those lines.