We spend a lot of time talking about the best televisions and grills and the other great home tech that can make a game-watching get-together into a serious party, but there's one great invention that gets less attention even though it does just as much to ensure a good time...
The Labor Day weekend for me was filled with lots of fun, food and football. My gracious hosts in St. Louis (Thanks Heidy and Scott!) were generous with their home and their booze, supplied via their kegerator.
If you don't know what a kegerator is, let us site the wonderful Wikipedia: Kegerator is a term used to describe a residential draft beer dispensing device.
Whether it's store-bought or DIY'd at home, a kegerator is part fridge, part keg and all fun. You can keep a tapped keg fresh and cold for months without it ever getting skunky. Consider it a grown-up step-up from the iced trash can you had in college.
A store-bought kegerator will run you a few hundred, but when you put that up against the dough you'll save on bottles and cans, it's well worth it as we head into football season! Or you could check out this page for detailed instructions on how to DIY your own from an old frigde.
(Images: Flickr members grrrrr123 and Bruce Turner licensed under Creative Commons.)
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god i wish...
i brew my own beer and bottle it all right now, when i have room, i am stepping up the operation and going to start kegging it as well as get a kegerator.
I'll bet that there were alot of kergerators left behind in the abandoned homes of people that walked away from their mortgages or had their homes foreclosed.
a kegerator, a lay-z-boy with a built-in cooler, and a propane turkey fryer. the dreams of every overweight Midwestern male...
*cite, not site
I don't associate home-brewed and kegged beer with an excessive lifestyle. I'll bet there were more sub-zero wine fridges left behind in the mortgage fallout than kegerators.
Don't mean to soap-box it but I feel compelled to respond to a comment about a subject that I feel strongly about. Brewing beer at home is about quality over quantity. It's just as much about the crafting as it is about the consuming.
It's also about value. If you brew your own beer you begin to understand what it costs to produce a quality product at home for less than what it costs to buy it. You also learn that many domestic beers which are cheap to buy are low quality because their near water taste is meant to encourage heavy consumption. You may hear stories of someone "downing a 12 pack" of Natural Light but you wouldn't hear someone say I downed a 12 pack of 3 Floyds for example.
At the same time, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I may have dreams of a kegerator, a lay-z-boy with built in cooler and a turkey fryer and am a Midwestern male (5'11 165-170#)
oh yeah, kegging is even more economical and easier than bottling your own beer. (so why haven't I kegged yet?)
Buying your beer from only the mega-brewers is akin to buying all your food from McDonalds. If you care about your food (it's flavour, quality, impact...) you would brew your own, or at least support your local craft brewers.
Kegerators are a sign of enlightenment, not lack of social status.
Wow haggie1, could you possibly stereotype any more? What a ridiculous bunch of hogwash! Sheer bigotry in fact.
Typically it is homebrewers like me who have kegerators, and for them it is mostly about quality not quantity. Just like people who enjoy fine cooking, I enjoy brewing because I can make precisely the beer I want, and it will be way better than most of what I can buy. And a side bonus is that it will be way cheaper too.
I've got 2 kegerators, and each holds 4 kegs of beer. Yet I have not touched a drop of it in close to 2 weeks now. Go figure.
BTW, for those who are not so caught up in themselves, I happen to have one of the best how-to pages on the internet, on setting up a kegging system. <a hre="http://www.bodensatz.com/staticpages/index.php?page=Soda-Kegs">See this page for details</a>.