The "Kegerator"

About two years ago, long before I started homebrewing, my co-worker Tim bought a new refrigerator, and was about to put his old, perfectly functioning one out on the curb. Instead of letting it go to waste, I borrowed a truck and picked it up from his house.

A beer drinking friend and I had been kicking around the idea of setting up a draft system in my garage, and a free refrigerator was all we needed to get the ball rolling.

Once we cleaned it out and got it into the garage, I went to some website and ordered a kegerator conversion kit. We gutted the fridge, removing all the shelving to maximize usable space, and cut up some pressure treated lumber to support the keg and CO2 cylinder.

The kit contained a shank and faucet, which was installed through the door. I used a one inch hole saw, borrowed from my father, to make a spot for it. The whole set up took maybe an hour.

Not only was having a draft system in my garage very cool, it was also very economical. Back then, the amount of beer being drank in my garage was pretty serious, and buying a keg for $60 versus countless 12-packs was a big cash saver.

Life was good. People were happy.

Eventually, peoples schedules changed, and things started slowing down. My garage, once a hub for extended periods of beer drinking, stopped being a "Man Room" and turned back into a "garage". It was not unlike a comic book where the superhero loses his superpowers, or something like that. For months, my garage housed no parties, only a bunch of stuff that some family members left behind when they moved away. I shut off the kegerator to save electricity.

Then, I started brewing my own beer, and I found a whole new use for the kegerator.

When planning my first batch, I realized I needed a space to ferment my beer. It needed to be consistently 70-75 degrees, dark, clean, and large enough to hold a five gallon bucket. Most things I read suggested using a closet, with fans and bottles of frozen water to regulate temperature.

Forget that mess. I turned the fridge back on.

The fridge doesn't have a precise temperature gauge, just a one through five setting where one is kind of cold and five is almost freezing. To fine tune the fridges internal temperature for optimal fermenting conditions, I bought an external thermostat, which I calibrated using a plain old mercury thermometer. It worked absolutely perfectly, and it gave me a huge advantage going into the homebrewing game.

These days, I no longer use the kegerator as a fermentation cellar. It has two taps on the door, as pictured above, and those taps only pour homebrew, no Miller, no Bud.

More on that later. I'm at work right now, and I have more important things to do than update this blog. Like check the score of the Super Bowl.

Thanks for reading!