For the past year and a half or two years I have been experimenting with home brewing and made up a few pretty darn good beers. The documentation is thin, but looking back I have made a brown ale, a pumpkin ale, a Christmas brew, a summer ale and a few other random concoctions which all turned out to be quite drinkable. I did however fail to write down anything on them, including how they tasted or smelled or even the alcohol content. With that, the former will be the last you hear about batches BK (before kegerator).
Over the past two weeks I have turned the switch and set myself up for some serious brewing. It all started with a simple Vienna style lager that I wanted to properly lager ferment in the fridge. So I removed a few shelves, adjusted some temperatures, and viola! I'm lager fermenting. Little did I realize that the freezer is also effected by this change in temperature and my wife was none to happy. The result, I was given an old dorm fridge and turned it into my own personal lager fridge. See a picture of this ridiculous contraption which is not allowed out of the basement below.
With this retrofit going so well my mind started to move into the kegerator realm, which is a place it moves to and from on a very frequent basis. When picking up supplies for the next batch of brew (oatmeal stout!!) we started talking to the owner about kegging beer. Seeing as how I have all the necessary equipment to do so, I was already planning on putting the lager into a keg, and the keg into my lager fridge. We were told however that one could fit upwards of 4 corney kegs into a fairly small chest freezer. When my mind moves into kegerator land it almost always ends up on converting a freezer into a kegerator, and my wife had always agreed that I could do that....in our next house. The news that you do not need a large freezer for 4 kegs however was new, and started the wheels spinning in such a way that we all knew where this would end up before we even left the store!
The revelation that I will soon have a kegerator worthy of holding 4 kegs of delicious homemade brew has prompted me to document my brewing online for the masses, or at least myself, to enjoy. I will start with the conversion of the freezer to a kegerator, then try to document the home brews batch by batch. Whenever my brother, the micro brewery aficionado comes to town we also frequent many of the local establishments, so I am sure some of those trips will be worthy of a posting.
A picture of the retrofitted lager fridge
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"Give a man a beer, and he wastes an hour, but teach a man how to brew, and he wastes a lifetime."
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