After many trips to Lowes and Home Depot, boxes upon boxes being delivered, returned, and redelivered to the house, and actually brewing the beer, the kegerator is finally complete! Par for the course however, turning on the freezer would not go as smoothly as it probably should have….
I finally received my refurbished kegs in the mail and with a batch hanging out in a keg already and another in the carboy I was ready to get rolling. I took a good amount of time cleaning the “new” kegs to remove whatever the hell had been in there before, sanitized a few times, and then ran the solution through all the kegerator tubing to make sure everything was good and clean. I moved my lager from the older keg it was sitting in to a freshly sanitized one, pressurized, and threw it into the freezer. Next up was the oatmeal stout which followed the same process but from the carboy. At this point things are looking good and it’s time to turn on the freezer and get me some cold beer! I plugged in the freezer and temperature monitor, grabbed a celebratory beer from the fridge, and went to bed.
The next day after getting home from work I went to check on my baby and was hit with a blast of cold air that felt a lot colder than 40 F. After a quick analysis of the situation I could see the light bulb appear above my head as I realized that just because the freezer and the temperature controller are plugged in, they will not work together if they are not plugged into EACHOTHER! So now with lines frozen full of beer/sanitization liquid, and two kegs of frozen beer I started to get concerned. I turned off the freezer, took the kegs out to them them come back up to temp and had a beer to help me wallow in my many mistakes.
Over the next few days everything came back to normal and the kreezer is working perfectly. The only problem is that I am having a lot of trouble carbonating the beer. Weeks prior I had put the priming sugar into the keg with the lager and was under the impression that should take care of the carbonation. I think because it was not kept cold during this time the priming sugar could not really do its job. With the stout I had a small mishap with the priming sugar and was only able to add about 1/4 of the bag. Knowing this I used the following chart http://www.kegerators.com/carbonation-table.php to determine what PSI I should set these two beer at, continued to move them around so the beer was fully saturated with CO2, and set them to sit for a few days.
Yesterday I grew impatient of waiting and poured a sample of each beer. They were both carbonated and free flowing from the kegs!! The lager was surprisingly good with a little more hoppiness than I expected. The stout was a little sweeter than I typically like with some hits of chocolate, but overall a good beer. To fill up the rest of the spots we have a Belgian Wit and an Octoberfest in the works. More on those to come, but for how its time to celebrate the completed project!!
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“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.” – Dave Barry
