Home Kegerator

[jeffdrafttech]

Fuck, I wrote too much. Skip down to the stuff in bold for a summary

Chemda mentioned in the Tuesday show that a kegerator is on their wish list

I build commercial draught systems.

I want to warn that a cheap version of commercial systems can end up with a lot of wasted money and beer.

Home Depot and Sams club both offer kegerators for around $500. These can work, but only in limited uses. The cheapest commercial single keg fridge is around $1200, and still has shortcomings. A $500 system is much worse than a $1200 system

Draft beer dispensers are usually designed to draw from frequently used kegs, and are unforgiving if only used sporadically. Problems from sporadic use are worse in cheap home systems.

What it comes down to is that if gas comes out of solution in the line, it makes a bubble. The bubble leaves the faucet as foam.

Foamed beer takes up 3-4 times the space as liquid beer, in a glass. A beer line in a kegerator holds about 1.5oz of beer. If you get 1.5 ounces of foam in a draw, it will fill about a third of a 16oz glass right away. This foam is basically a 4oz reservoir of CO2 in the bottom of the glass.

If you draw beer into a pocket of foam in a glass, you will force CO2 gas into any liquid beer in the glass, and that gas will nucelize the gas in the liquid beer, and bring it out of solution causing more foam. Put more simply: bubbles forced into beer pull more gas out of the beer and results in a cascade of foam.

The result of this is that when you draw a beer, an initial shot of foam results in wild beer and a difficult pour, even after the beer draws clear from the faucet.

Cheap kegerators do a poor job of chilling the line, all of the way to the faucet. If the line remains at rest, the slightly higher temperature of the line causes the beer to release its gas and the line develops the gas pockets.

I made this illustration years ago to illustrate the issue
Like my 1998 MS paint skills?

The illustration points out that the system pressure is too low, and the low pressure is causing the problem. In cheap kegerators, it is nearly impossible to set the pressure high enough to prevent it because the tower is usually not cooled and the kegerator main area is cooled with a cheap metal plate with no air circulation. Keeping the gas dissolved in the beer is difficult because a 1-2 degree temperature difference is enough to need more pressure. Solubility of CO2 in water (beer) is very sensitive to temperature

If the keg is slightly warm it's a lot worse because the cheap coolers are not powerful enough to bring the temperature of the keg down to a usable level.

If you do set the gas pressure high enough to prevent gas from breaking out in the line, you need to drink the keg in a very short period of time or excess gas will dissolve into the beer in the keg, and the last 10-20% of the beer in the keg will over-carbonate.

None of this is an issue with hand pumps because by design the hose is very short, the keg is very cold, and the flow rate is very low. If you buy a kegerator the line will be 3-4 times as long, the keg will not be as cold (because the fridge will be shit), and the flow rate will be much much higher (120 oz/min vs about 40 oz/min)

If you have one very cold keg in a kegerator and are having a party, you won't have issues. When the tap is used often, the cold beer will keep the line chilled and gas pockets won't have time to form (assuming the pressure of the CO2 is balanced correctly with the beer temperature). Problems develop when the tap is static for 15-20 minutes and the gas breaks out in the line and pockets of gas build up.

If you are buying a kegerator to use when you have a house full of thirsty beer drinkers, a home kegerator isn't a bad toy. If you plan to use it to replace everyday occasional beer drinking, you'll regret the purchase.

The whole home keg dispense site I made ten years ago with more info is at http://www.angelfire.com/ks2/beer/homekeg.html I made that site because I got tired of consumers with home taps sending me email questions from my commercial site. The site is old and antiquated but is accurate (mostly). I lost the password to the site years ago so if anyone "in the know" wants to give me shit about it don't bother, I can't update it. The commercial section with the broken images is the extent of my knowledge 10 years ago, and is stuck that way.

A last word on the subject:
most macro-brew is available in 30 packs. There are 5.5 30-packs in a 1/2bbl (15.5 gallon) keg (or 6.8 24-packs). A 30 pack is about $19 where I live. 19 times 5.5 is $104.50. A keg will set you back about $96 here. Your savings from buying a keg in my market is less than $10. If you buy cans of beer the cups are built in, and you don't waste a drop (plus you can recycle the cans for cash if you're into that sort of thing). A very cheap kegerator is $500 and is only good for heavy use at parties. You must buy 50 kegs to offset even a very cheap kegerator (or 120 kegs to offset a nice commercial unit).

Keep in mind that a kegerator almost never includes a CO2 bottle and that will cost another $100.

You can convert an old refrigerator to dispense draft beer for about $150 if you buy a bunch of stolen shit on ebay, but even if you buy a used fridge for $50, you need to buy 20 kegs to pay for it if you don't waste a drop of beer.

I doubt that anyone made it this far into the message, but the moral is: kegerators aren't a great investment. YOu are paying hundreds of dollars for the romance and cool factor, and they don't work very well in a home environment.

[Incognito]

[11#cock]

So are you building Keith a Home Kegerator?

[Lanfear]

So I assume you do not have a system similar to PerfectDraft by Philips in the US?


The PerfectDraft is a new appliance manufactured by PHILIPS with a real tap handle, internal cooling system, pump, and 6 litre light metal keg. The appliance keeps beer at a constant temperature of 3° C. Once installed, the beer stays fresh for four weeks.

Great for barbecues, Christmas, Birthday Parties, no more trips to the bottle bank, no more hassle looking after your guests - they just pour their own!


BTW - 6 L ~ 203 ounces

[Lanfear]

And yes I do know that this is way to little for a big party and also not exactly the cheapest beer - but isn't it stylish?

[JamIsNotGlue]

Originally Posted by jeffdrafttech

The site is old and antiquated but is accurate (mostly). I lost the password to the site years ago so if anyone "in the know" wants to give me shit about it don't bother, I can't update it.

Did you try password for the password?

But seriously, thanks for this. I was planning on purchasing one of these bad boys in the very near future and you may have saved me many hundreds of dollars.

[Deadlysherpa]

The part I like most about this (other than learning more about beer) is that he offered the information BEFORE keith found out his kegarator was shit and that he lost $500.

[MaH112]

Originally Posted by Lanfear

And yes I do know that this is way to little for a big party and also not exactly the cheapest beer - but isn't it stylish?

We got one downstairs. Its a cool ting to have but since it doesnt use CO2 as propellant the beer tastes too shitty for my taste.

[LArciniega]

I just use an old plastic laundry bucket and a shit ton of ice. i throw my keg in the center and voila, I got 5gals of cold beer when I wake up. I also end up getting a wet carpet from when the ice melts and leaks through the hole in the bucket.

[jeffdrafttech]

Originally Posted by Lanfear

So I assume you do not have a system similar to PerfectDraft by Philips in the US?


The PerfectDraft is a new appliance manufactured by PHILIPS with a real tap handle, internal cooling system, pump, and 6 litre light metal keg. The appliance keeps beer at a constant temperature of 3° C. Once installed, the beer stays fresh for four weeks.

Great for barbecues, Christmas, Birthday Parties, no more trips to the bottle bank, no more hassle looking after your guests - they just pour their own!


BTW - 6 L ~ 203 ounces

Heineken has those here, but I can't remember what size the kegs were. I calculated the beer cost and it was very near to the price of bottled beer. If they lowered the price of the beer a bit, I'd consider one.

Amazon has the dispense units for those for $250. Has anyone here used one? Does it do a good job keeping the beer cold?

I saw a unit similar to the heine keg at the Coors brewery about 18 months ago. It was a very very complete pre-producton sample and was indeed a 6L keg. It looked like a party pig that homebrewers use (it used a built in CO2 cartridge instead of an inflating bag like the pig, but the faucet restriction thing was almost identical to a pig). The Coors unit is/was supposed to be priced competitively with the beer sold in cans. It was packaged in a box that doubled as a cooler, like the party balls in the 90s. I have no idea if it will ever see the wide marketplace, but judging by the looks of the unit I was given, it was ready for production and had probably been test marketed somewhere.