One of the biggest expenses when moving to a kegging system for your homebrew beer is finding a way to keep it cold. [Sanchmo] took a traditional route of using a chest freezer, but a bit of extra effort made the ordinary looking appliance into a 5 tap showpiece in his livingroom.
Home brewing is most often done in five gallon batches, so Cornelius kegs (for soda) work perfectly. The chest freezer used here has plenty of room for five of them and a canister of carbon dioxide. A temperature controller (something along these lines) turns the freezer into a refrigerator. But to make it beautiful [Sanchmo] hit the wood shop pretty hard. He screwed a sheet of plywood to the lid and then trimmed it out, along with a tower to hold the taps. This was further accented with the inclusion of some LEDs for effect.
We did find one word of warning in the Reddit discussion. It’s possible that the original metal housing of the freezer is used as a heat sink which is now covered in wood paneling. We’re not sure if this is true of this particular model or not, but some investigation is warranted if you’re thinking of building your own.
Not to be a buzzkill but these builds are a dime a dozen (google keezer). There’s nothing novel here, nor is there any detail on important parts of the build like how the tap lines in the upper housing are chilled, temperature control, or LED wiring.
I have to agree. This might be relevant on the Make site (with all due respect to both them and this particular project, both of which are awesome) but where’s the “hack” that makes it worthy of a HAD mention? I come to this site for all the awesome stuff that’s too technical for the mainstream sites.
A nice looking beer appliance.Yea when I seen it, the first thought in my mind was, I hope the condenser isn’t using the freezer walls to dissipate the heat. I imagine building the wooden cabinet in such a manner to encourage a natural bottom to top air flow between it in the freezer walls would allow life as long as the freezer would have had otherwise.
Nicer builds I’ve seen include slats behind the facing, creating airflow channels over the metal skin. Which can then be enhanced further with an additional fan into said ducting, tied into your temperature controller so it only runs while the freezer does.
Good thing tap dispensing is so accurate, and that beer hardly ever foams overs, otherwise the lack of a sink/drain would be major PITA.
You just get a bar mat like all bars use already.
What I dont see is how he is keeping all the extra weight OFF of the seal. they are not designed to hold an extra 80 pounds of wood and crap. Although the whole thing looks based on a freezer he found on the side of the road.
My friends built something like this with a chest freezer and it died after a year due to the lack of airflow over the outside walls. Definitely something to worry about if this freezer has the same design.