Beer Glasses: Kegerator Build

Over the past 6 months or so I have been working on putting together a kegerator to dispense my home brews. It ended up becoming a process, with many trips to the hardware store, but I finally have fresh beer on tap in my apartment. It's pretty boss. I'm glad I finally got the thing up and running. There is nothing better then being able to pour yourself a beer straight from the tap.

As a homebrewer there are several important benefits to kegging versus bottling. Number one, cleaning, sanitizing, filling, and capping the fifty plus bottles needed for one five gallon batch of beer is a bitch. It is much easier to clean, sanitize, and fill, just one five gallon keg. Number two, carbonating takes less then half the time when kegging. Once a beer ferments fully, it kinda blows that you have to wait another two weeks while it bottle conditions before you can drink it. With kegging you get the same, often better, results in less then a week. Number three, with bottling you have a layer of yeast and sometimes sediment at the bottom of each bottle. This means, if you don't want a yeasty beer, you need to cut your pour at exactly the right moment leaving about a quarter inch of beer left in the bottle. That kinda stinks. When kegging, you can leave all that yeast and sediment behind in the fermentor. Also, it is sweet that when I know I need to call it a night soon, I can grab just a half of a beer. Also it is just cool in general to have draft beer in your apartment.

Although it took some time to complete, it really was not difficult. You could probably do the whole thing in one day if you had all the right parts and tools on hand. The fridge I used was a Sanyo 4912 mini fridge. This model is discontinued but there are still a bunch out there. Grab one while you can. I had to remove the shelves and cut out the molded shelves that are part of the door in order to make enough room for the kegs, CO2 tank, regulators, and all the tubing. Next I located the refrigeration line that runs across the top of the fridge using a

method I read about online. It involved spreading a mixture of corn starch and rubbing alcohol on top of the fridge, turning it on, and then waiting to see where the mixture dried first. It drys right over the hot line, so I knew not to drill there as I didn't want to turn the fridge into a giant paper weight. Once the line was located, I drilled a hole in the top for the connection tubes using a hole saw. Then I mounted my tap tower on top. That's pretty much it.

Probably the most difficult part was an optional step that I decided to take. I constructed a fan box with a flexible tube running out of the side. The purpose of the box is to blow cold air

up into the tap tower. This will keep the beer in the line cold and cut down on foam coming out of the tap. I ran the ac adapter out of the drain hole in the fridge. I used one of the plastic shelves that came with the fridge as a shelf for the CO2 canister and fan box. Everything fits inside, but it is tight and I need to arrange things just right in order to shut the door properly.

Enjoy the pictures below. Right now I have an extract IPA and an all grain pale ale on tap. Cheers.