Self Serve, draft Table / Keezer build

After starting my foray into home brewing beer. It became quickly apparent that I needed to keg my beer instead of bottling it. Bottling beer is a tedious and messy experience. But kegging is easy, you don't have to wash  and sanitize 48 bottles. Or fill them one by one with a plastic wand.

But when you keg, you have beer on tap whenever you want! Of course that means that you need all the equipment; Kegs, CO2 tanks, regulators, refrigeration, etc. It can add up quickly, and get expensive. There are some commercial models available, but they'll run you quite a bit. And they tend to just look like a mini fridge with faucets.

I wanted something more custom, that fit just right into a corner of my dining room. I went with the keezer style because it provided more space to fit up to 4 kegs (5 if I usd 2.5 gallon kegs!) So I made my own! The front and sides are painted with a chalkboard paint. It's framed in cherry, and the top is a birch ply wood.

 

An important part of most keezer designs is centered around the "collar". It's used to increase the internal volume of the freezer, and in other designs is what the faucets are mounted too. The original top is placed on top of the collar, and no holes are drilled into freezer itself. I really wanted a nice looking top with a draft tower instead, so my design ended up more complicated. 

The collar was a simple frame of 2x6. With weather stripping stapled to the bottom so that it created a decent seal.

 

Here you can see how the top is mounted to the collar by way of the hinges (Repurposed from the freezer). The top and collar simply sit on top of the freezer, and aren't attached to the facade in any way. 

The facade was a 3 sided box, with a cherry frame surrounding  1/8" plywood. I used an internal wood frame made of 1x2s to help me mount every thing together. It probably wasn't necessary and may have made the construction more difficult that it needed to be. Oh well.

I made a lot of mistakes while making this draft table. I feel like every time I turned around I had miscut something by an inch. It all worked out in the end. But this is one mistake I thought worth documenting. The freezer has a small lip on the top, but the internal dimensions of the facade were about 1/4" too small to fit the freezer lip. I was just lucky enough that I was able to use a chisel and carve out an awful looking groove to fit the lip. Now it fits perfectly!

And here's the first thing I put on tap. It's an irish stout I brewed from a partial mash/extract kit I got for Christmas. We tried it for the first time with a corned beef and cabbage.