My Kegerator Build

I've been brewing now for a few years. For the majority of that time I bottled everything I brewed, and it was a huge pain in the ass -

My process generally included de-labeling the bottles, cleaning the bottles with PBW or OxyClean, sanitizing them with StarSan, rinsing the bottles and drying them on a bottle tree, then adding corn sugar to the finished beer and stirring it, then filling each bottle and capping each bottle. 5 gallons of beer will fill over 2 cases of 12 oz. bottles, so this was a huge time suck, and drove me to look into kegging my beer.

I bought a starter keg setup that came with a ball lock keg, fittings, & a picnic tap. I found a 20 pound CO2 keg on Craigslist and a mini fridge. My first kegerator was born - 

 

At this point, I hoped that the fridge would hold a constant temperature without a temp. controller. This ended up not being the case and I actually froze my beer. Of course I didn't realize this at first and wondered why my honey amber ale was suddenly a 9% beer. I opened the keg after a while and found a solid block of beer ice inside. Needless to say I dumped that beer.

After doing a lot of research and reading, I decided I wanted to make a true keezer (keg freezer) build that utilizes a chest freezer with a temperature controller. Depending on the size of the chest freezer, you can hold quite a few Cornelius kegs and the CO2 tank. I'll provide a full bill of materials at the bottom of this post.

My fiance found a great deal on a chest freezer and bought it for me a Christmas present. I immediately got to work measuring the inside of the freezer and determined that I needed to use 2 x 10's to build a wood collar tall enough to house the kegs with plenty of room to spare including the chest freezer's shelf. I measured the dimensions of the freezer, cut the wood & laid it on top prior to assembling to check that everything fit correctly - 

I used wood screws and angle brackets from Home Depot and assembled the collar. Then I took the beer shank's front pieces and laid them out on the front of the collar to figure out how high I would want my taps. I measured the overall distance and ensured each tap was equally spaced apart -

I drilled the holes using a 1 inch spade bit which made quick work of the wood. I sanded the inside of the holes and the collar itself to leave it nice and smooth -

Next I made sure that the beer facuets fit in the holes, everything was looking great so far - 

Next it was time to stain the wood collar prior to attaching it to the chest freezer. My fiance wanted to stain it and she did a kick ass job -

It took a few days to fully dry but ended up looking fantastic -

Now it was time to attach the wood collar to the chest freezer. I used clear silicone and applied a steady bead of it along the entire edge of the chest freezer. Then I sat the freezer lid on top of the collar and added weights on top to ensure that the seal would be good once the silicone dried -

Now it was time to attach the liquid lines - 

And the gas distributor / gas lines - 

 

Once that was done, all that was left was to re-attach the lid to the wooden collar and paint the front of the kegerator with chalkboard paint. Our cat had to check it out as well - 

The almost final product ended up looking pretty great. The drip tray was made from a 10 dollar thin sheet metal piece I found at Home Depot in the section where they stock heating / cooling vent stuff. I used rivets and a few metal hooks to attach it to the wood collar and it has done a great job catching any drips from the faucets -

 

Clearly I'm still missing a faucet which I plan to probably get a dual regulator to be able to have one beer at a separate PSI than the other beers attached to the system. This could also end up being for a stout faucet in the future.

All in all, this was a pretty easy project. There are a lot of great resources and other examples on www.reddit.com/r/homebrewing or homebrewtalk that you can check out if you need to see how others have done it.

One thing you must do after hooking everything up is checking for leaks. I drained my 20 lbs CO2 tank in about a months time due to a leak in my system. Use soapy water or StarSan on all your connections when you hook it up for the first time and look for air leaks that create bubbles. This will save you money and a headache down the road and literally takes 10 minutes tops to do.

Overall Bill of Materials:

- Home Depot 7.0 cubic ft. chest freezer

- CO2 tank with CO2 regulator

- 4-way gas distributor

- Beer facuets with beer shanks, beer shank liquid nozzle attachment with neoprene beer washers

- Ball lock connections for gas & liquid for each keg in the kegerator & tubing to connect each keg to the gas distributor & liquid beer faucets

- Analog temperature controller

- Home-made drip tray made from bending and riveting sheet metal

- Mailbox numbers for labeling each tap

A lot of this stuff can be found on homebrewing websites like Midwest Supplies or Northern Brewer. Northern Brewer has an amazing video showing you step by step how to assemble everything here: http://www.northernbrewer.com/how-to-build-a-keezer-or-freezer-kegerator/

All in all, this does require some time and money, but if you have the time you can usually find some things used on craigslist or online, or slowly acquire parts over time. Nothing is cooler than having your own homebrew on draft and filling kegs is a hundred times easier than bottling all of your beer.

Thanks for reading,

Ryan

Fermentation

Less than 24 hours later and fermentation has begun on my Dunkelweizen. Fermentation occurs when yeast begins to convert the sugars present in the wort into alcohol, thus creating beer. The tan / white foam on the top of the fermenting wort is called a Krausen -

During the first few days, the Krausen on a beer can fill your fermentation vessel to an extreme amount. Often times a carboy doesn't have enough space to contain the Krausen and if not properly directed elsewhere through a blowoff tube, your beer will explode all over leaving a huge mess. Always use a blowoff tube even if you think you won't need one - 

Fermentation can take anywhere from 10 days to up to a full month depending on the beer style. Once the specific gravity on a beer doesn't change for 3 or 4 consecutive days, your beer is done fermenting. However, as a rule of thumb, I always leave my beer in a single fermentation vessel for at least 3 weeks to let the yeast fully finish its work.

It's also one of my favorite things to watch while brewing; fermentation is very active usually and is one reason I like to brew in see-through containers to observe it -

Brew on!

Ryan

Brew Day - Dunkelweizen

I have decided to start a blog where I can document my brewing and add photos & videos explaining homebrew techniques and processes.

Today I brewed a Dunkelweizen, which is a German dark wheat ale. They are known for being filling and flavorful and can have hints of bananas and clove depending on how you ferment it. Dunkels have always been one of my favorite styles of beer. There's just something simple yet complex about them and they are usually always different, surprising & delicious -

The recipe I used is Mike Hiller's Dunkelweizen and can be found here: http://brewlocal.blogspot.com/2010/01/mike-hiller-dunkelweizen-recipe.html I made few changes like reducing the number of hops.

Below are some photos I took while brewing. First I filled a 5 gallon pot with 4 gallons of water and heated it to 166 degrees Fahrenheit -

I poured the water into my 10 gallon Home Depot igloo cooler and then stirred about 12 lbs of various grains into the water, ensuring that there are no dry spots or clumps of grain -

While that sat at around 148 degrees for an hour or so, I measured out my hops. This particular beer requires a 90 minute boil and I don't make my first hop addition until 30 minutes into the boil. The bags and balls are just things I've acquired to keep the hop pellets from making a huge mess in the beer. The hops are still mixed into the beer during boil and I've always had good results using these - 

I also got my Yeast packet ready. For this beer I used Wyeast's 3068 Weihenstephan strain. I've used this one before and got great results. I especially like the activator packs because you can bust the nutrient packet on the inside and let the yeast start to become active for 2-3 hours prior to pouring it into your finished wort. This saves me time because I don't have to create a full yeast starter, though I still do if I have enough time & planning forethought -

I use a 5 gallon ACE cooler as my hot liquor tank and to measure water. It holds hot water at a stable temperature and I can slowly drain water out of it onto my mash tun's grain bed - 

I use a tiered brew system to drain the wort from my mash tun into the brew kettle, which has a propane burner under it. The draining of the water into the mash tun into the kettle takes a good 35 - 45 minutes usually, I don't rush this step to ensure I extract as much from the grains in the mash tun as possible - 

A close up of my ghetto fly sparge method - using aluminum foil with holes poked in it that slowly drips water over the top of my grain bed - 

Once all or most of my wort has been fully collected, I take a sample to ensure I hit my target specific gravity. Basically this ensures that the beer will come out with a correct ABV reading and that everything is on-track prior to boil - 

I use a tool called a Refractometer. This allows me to take a very small sample of cooled wort with an eye dropper and place it on the viewing area, and then look through the eye hole to get a Brix scale reading which I can convert to a gravity reading - 

I saw a reading of about 12.4 Brix, or 1.049 for my original gravity, which is what my brewing software predicted within .001. Close enough!

Once the beer has been boiling and hops are added throughout the 90 minute boil, the grain from the mash tun can be disposed of. Many people like to reuse this to make bread or dog treats, something I'd like to try in the near future - 

The stuff in between this and the final product is a lot of just moving the beer from one place to another. Cooling it from boiling to 70 degrees and siphoning it to the plastic food-safe carboy where it will ferment with the ale yeast I showed earlier -  

That was the brew day. One thing I've noticed is my efficiency (amount of end wort basically) is really terribly low. I may need to use more water in the long run or just investigate ways to improve efficiency overall.

Thanks for reading!

Ryan