Mmm, beer — see more pictures below or in the gallery

It was a cold day on December 8, 2002. The parents were in town with the minivan making it an ideal time to arrange transportation of the chest freezer. First stop was the beer distributor to pick up the 1/4 keg of Yuengling. Second stop was the welding supply store to get the CO2 canister filled. Third stop was Lowe’s building construction warehouse to get the chest freezer. This narrative recounts how we proceeded to void our warranty within minutes of removing the chest freezer from the box. You see, this chest freezer aspired to more than frozen TV dinners; it wanted to host our beer.

For years rationality had overcome my desires to own a kegerator. I satisfied those cravings with frequent trips to the local establishments as well as using a dorm-sized fridge exclusively to store bottled beer. Irrationality won the struggle soon after buying my house. A kegerator lets you enjoy draft beer at your house rather than having to buy those leetle 12oz bottles. Instead you purchase beer in convenient 7.5 or 15 gallon sizes. Once you add your own carbon dioxide and appropriate serving hardware you have draft beer.

There are a number of places on the web where you can order the parts for your own kegerator. First be aware that there are two styles: refrigerator conversion kits and tower kits. Refrigerator kits are far more economical and easier. You find an old refrigerator, drill a hole in the door, put all your parts in the fridge, and start drinking beer. The problem is the aesthetic of another fridge in your house. (I’ve also heard that some older fridges cannot maintain the required 28-38 degrees Fahrenheit needed for your beer, but most fridges are fine. More free advice is that very old fridges are quite inefficient and you may end up paying for electricity instead of a more newer fridge.)

A tower kit can be mounted directly on top of a chest freezer. This is convenient because you can get a smallish chest freezer and pretend it’s just a small counter rather than another monolithic appliance. However, the quick readers will have already done the mental computations to realize that beer doesn’t like to be frozen. So there is another step compared to the refrigerator conversion — you must make the chest freezer run at refrigerator temperatures.

The thermostat in the chest freezer uses a thermocouple to sense the temperature in the freezer compartment. The resistance on the thermocouple varies with temperature, which is sensed by the thermostat and compared to your temperature setting to maintain the right coolness. If you are extremely lucky, you just set your thermostat to its warmest setting and hope it’s about 34 degrees. On its warmest setting our chest freezer runs at 9 degrees Fahrenheit which would make for very chilly beer.

Some others have reported success in changing the thermocouple or otherwise hacking the thermostat in the chest freezer to make it run warmer. The rest of us non-electrical engineers will buy another thermostat. This one senses temperature in the compartment and either provides or withholds power from the entire chest freezer. That is, the chest freezer plugs into this thermometer and it only gets electricity when the thermostat decides the compartment should be colder.

The following is a blow-by-blow account of our conversion steps including some advice on how to do it differently if you’re following in our (staggering) footsteps.

The Parts

The abbreviated instructions are to obtain the following:

• Keg of beer
• Full CO2 cylinder
• Tower conversion kit
• Chest freezer

... and put them together.

Keg of beer

There are three basic types of beer taps available, which correspond roughly to domestic, imports, and screwballs. Our “local” beer, Yuengling, is one of the screwball types and so I ordered the “twin-probe tap”. Before buying the chest freezer, I did some research on the internet to find out the size of the keg. I found out that the largest keg won’t fit in most chest freezers. I was hoping to get the smallest chest freezer possible but that didn’t fit the keg in either height or diameter.

After doing research on the internet and at the local Home Depot and Lowe’s stores, I then actually measured beer kegs at the local distributor. Based on what I measured I’m still not completely confident that my freezer will hold a large (i.e. half-barrel) keg. (Just to be confusing, kegs come in half and quarter barrels but no full barrels — that’s good because a half barrel keg already weighs as much as I do).

I recommend buying beer you like because you’ll be drinking it all month.

Carbon Dioxide

I bought my CO2 canister online with the rest of the conversion hardware because the price was so good but others recommend buying local to save on freight charges. I just took this new canister to a welding supply house and paid $10 to have it filled. While waiting, I discovered that they don’t see very many of us kegerator types and that this $10 price is a bit arbitrary.

Tower Conversion Kit

Since I converted a chest freezer, which is about waist-high, the conversion kit needed a tower to mount the tap on. The other hardware includes the hoses, valves, tap, and spout. These were not difficult to install and didn’t require any drilling. When ordering your kit you may be tempted to avoid buying the drip tray and cleaning kit. This would be a mistake. Just like your local bar, your spout will save a drop or two until the glass has been removed and those drops will either splash any-which-way or they’ll get caught in your velcro-ed on and easily washable drip spout. The cleaning kit is for the insides of your tubing. You really will tell the difference between clean and dirty tubes so don’t be cheap on that item either. I got my kit from BeverageFactory.com and have been happy with the quality of their kit.

Chest Freezer

Our local Lowe’s had a large selection of chest freezers. The one we got was $180 with tax so it wasn’t even the most expensive part of the kegerator despite its requiring a minivan to get it back to the house. I had hopes initially that by running the freezer at its ‘‘warmest’‘ setting that it would be near freezing and OK for beer. Our Frigidare branded (but Lucky Gold on the inside) freezer was much too powerful, however, and dropped the temperature to 9 degrees Fahrenheit.

(For those Europeans reading this who don’t know Fahrenheit, I encourage you to stick your tongue to the freezer wall for a calibrated reading). So, I bought an external thermostat that controls the freezer’s power. You can get these thermostats from all of the kegerator stores like BeverageFactory.com. More on that gizmo later.

Construction

After getting everything out of the boxes and ogling at the beer dispensing glory, you eventually gotta put it together or you’ll stay thirsty. The first thing you’ll notice is that the freezer company neglected to put a hole in the top of the door. This would have been convenient but luckily we’re armed with power tools.

The local beer shop suggested that there are many ways of making a hole in the door and they’re all bad. We chose the cheapest of the bad which is using a 1” can bit for a drill.

And another thing to note is that a one-inch hole is not big enough. Sure, it will pass the 1/2” tube but what about the big connector on the end?

We drilled two side-by-side 1” holes but in hindsight that was a bad idea. The first hole went OK but the drill bit was ruined. The second hole was created by friction because you can see there were no teeth left on the drill bit. The hot drill bit plus the insulation in the door was a bad combination and stunk up the kitchen for hours.

If you’re reading this and thinking about doing it yourself, here’s what I recommend you do. Use a standard but biggish drill bit to create a starter hole. Then use a pair of tin snips, whose day job is cutting sheet metal, to make the hole the desired size and shape. I used tin snips to clean up the drilled hole and that was tons easier and cleaner (and no stink).

You’ve got to make a hole in the underside of the door too. In our case it was difficult because the surface was uneven as you can see here. Notice that our hole was just big enough to pass the hose and connector, making a tight fit. This is a mistake. The tower itself is insulated, so the cold air from the freezer should be free to go up into the tower and keep the beer in that part of the beer line cold. We’ll fix this soon. UPDATE Jan 2008: We still haven’t fixed it.

But the tower isn’t connected to the freezer door yet, so we carefully measure out where the four screws will go and drill four pilot holes. The screws they gave us were not sheet metal screws so we had to make another trip to Home Depot (it’s closer than Lowes) to get some.

Good, now we think we’ve got all the hard parts done. The tower is mounted to the top and the hose is run through the door. But since the freezer is still running at, well, freezer temperatures instead of blissfully chilly beer temperatures we need to install the external thermostat. This consists of three parts. The main body is a small box with a dial indicating desired temperature. There is a power cord that the freezer plugs into and the main unit can switch on and off. Finally there is a sausage on a thin copper wire that is the thermocouple. The trick is to get the sausage into the main chamber of the freezer.

Here’s the problem: The walls of the freezer have tubes in them that circulate the coolant. The walls are then filled with insulation. There’s no easy way to tell if you’re going to hit a coolant tube so be careful. I first drilled a pilot hole though the outer sheetmetal but just 1/4” inch in so as not to break any coolant tubes. Then I stuck a screwdriver in through the hole to search for any tubes close by. I got lucky and so I proceeded to drill a hole big enough to pass the sausage through.

Once inside, I just taped the thermocouple to the bottom using clear packing tape.

Then I used the tape to secure the box part to the rail of the freezer. I then used silicone caulk to fill up the hole that the copper wire runs through so no bad bad warm air comes in to bother our beer.

Then you just put all the parts inside and hook up the hoses. This makes you happy until you realize that your instructions do not tell you what pressure to use on the beer and you go back to the internet to find out.

Tweaking the Setup

You didn’t think everything would work immediately, did ya?

CO2 Pressure

As it turns out, you want the CO2 pressure to be between 12 and 14 psi. We had it too high, then too low. There is a lag between setting the pressure and the final reading because, I’m told, the beer will absorb or release CO2. Most kegs are come to you with about 12-14 psi and if you go higher or lower then CO2 will get pushed into or pulled out of the beer. You probably don’t want that and both conditions can cause the beer to be overly foamy. All I can vouch for is that Yuengling kegs come out well with 12-14 psi and don’t come out foamy.

Cleaning

We didn’t clean the beer lines initially and think that may have been why our beer didn’t taste so great. The second keg was very tasty and we cleaned the lines before hooking it up. We also cleaned the lines before the third keg but aren’t completely happy with it yet either. We now suspect that the age of the keg makes all the difference (see our [Beer Dating] page). Drop me an email if you have ideas.

Whacking Your Head Into the Door

You’ll probably do this too at some point since both my roommate Pat and I have done it. Here’s the setup: You want to pick up a heavy (full) keg and put it into the freezer. Since opening the door on the freezer would bang the tower into the wall, you pull the freezer away from the wall. When you pick up the heavy keg and try to hold it out in front of you, you find this is unnatural and press your body against the freezer — which then slides quickly away from you. Since you’re still holding that heavy keg, you tip forward too and whack your head into the top sill of the door. OK, now I’ve warned you so you can avoid looking like an idiot.

Denting the bottom of the freezer

After a couple of half kegs, we discovered that we were putting a dent in the bottom of the chest freezer because of the weight of the kegs. That’s what you are supposed to see in that first picture, but basically, it was a round dent.

We happened to have a piece of MDF shelving around (see second picture), so we put it into the bottom of the kegerator to distribute the weight and prevent any further denting (see third picture). I’d recommend doing this right off the bat, especially if you will be having half kegs.

Kegerator Fame

10 Feb 03: This page comes up as #5 on Google when you type in “Kegerator” (after Kegerator.net, reasonably).

Capacities & Dimensions

Note: These are approximate dimensions. Measure the brand of beer keg you want to fit in your kegerator — many freezers are 16.5 inches wide but some kegs are larger.

• 1/2 barrel of beer
  • contains approximately 15 gallons or 1,984 fluid ounces
  • equals approximately 7 cases of 12-ounce bottles or cans
  • height 23”
  • diameter 16”
  • 160-180 pounds

• 1/4 barrel of beer
  • contains approximately 7.75 gallons of beer
  • equals approximately 3.5 cases of 12-ounce bottles or cans
  • height 12-13”
  • diameter 16”
  • 80-85 pounds

Taps

Roughly speaking, European beers use one kind of tap, American beers use another, and oddball brews use a third kind (oh and Guinness uses their own tap and NO2 setup) (More info). Yuengling has changed over from a twin probe tap to a standard American tap (Sankey), as of Fall 2003.

More details on taps can be found at BeverageFactory and Kegman.

Dating your keg

While we all have a relationship with our beers, not everyone dates their kegs. With Yuengling and many other brands, the brew date is stamped on the bunghole of the keg. Yes, bunghole is the real name for the hole in the side of the metal keg that is sealed up with a cork. Yuengling stamps a number between 1 and 365 on the cork that represents the day of the year that the keg was brewed, e.g. 32 = February 1st. UPDATE Feb 2004: Since Yuengling is now using newer kegs, they are printing the date of manufacture on the top of the keg near the tap hole, still using the same day-of-year encoding.

How old is too old

One formula for dating is half your age plus seven but this hardly seems reasonable for spring chickens like beer kegs. The distributor asks the beer sellers to sell the kegs within 45 days of their manufacture. This might be ok if you are having a party and drinking all your beer the day of purchase. Those of us with kegerators keep the keg around for three to six weeks. Pat and I have noticed that the older the keg, the worse it tastes. We have not had a keg that tastes terrible but we did have a particularly fresh one that tasted great. UPDATE Feb 2004: We have been getting nice fresh kegs but didn’t bother to call ahead for our last one and got a 60 day old keg. Ugh! Yucky!

Buying sale kegs

One local beer distributor (that’s what they call the guys in Pittsburgh licensed to sell kegs and cases of beer — six packs can only be bought elsewhere and liquor still another place) was kind enough to tell me all about the dating process but then tried to sell me a “Yuengling Premium” keg he had on sale for $47. A great price, but he then told me, right after telling me about the 45 day rule, that the keg was made 90 days ago. This makes me worry that all sale kegs are the old kegs. Even if this is not true you’d better be careful and look at the bunghole.

Cozying up to your local distributor

We were able to get one of the local distributors to order a super-fresh keg from his wholesaler. If you’re going to have this sitting around in your kegerator for a month, it’s worth the little bit of prep time to call a few days ahead and see what you can arrange.

Here in Pittsburgh, we had luck calling the Wilkinsburg Beverage company (412-371-4242). Chris was willing to help us get the freshest keg possible. The last keg (28 Feb 03) had been kegged at the brewery just seven days before we got it. Thanks Chris!

Links

• Kegerator FAQ
• Kegerator construction pictures
• Real, honest-to-goodness dating with beer
• Dating beer labels
• More dating beer labels