my life, my thoughts, my world.

A while back, I finished my keezer build and kegged my first beer. Carbonating that beer seems to be causing me more problems than it should. For now, I am going to blame my lack of patience. There is some carbonation, but not as much as I think there should be. Then again, there is a persistant head on the beer and I don’t know that such a thing is possible without steady carbonation.

Anyway, I’ve kegged another beer and now have it force carbonating as well. My “Adventure Ale” will not have a beer line connected to it until it has sat under CO2 pressure (10psi @ 35°F) for at least three weeks. We will see if I end up with better carbonation results than I did with the German Kölsch. One thing I intend to do before too long is build a small plenum inside the keezer to keep the cold air moving inside, instead of all just settling down on the floor. There is a fairly significant, at least if you’re CO2 dissolved into an aqueous solution, temperature gradient from the floor (35°F) of the keezer to the shanks for my faucets (39°F). Right now, my best guess is that the temperature gradient is responsible for loss of carbonation between the keg and my glass.

German Kölsch

For a while now, I have been talking about building a “keezer.” If you do not know what that is, allow me to explain. A keezer is a beverage dispensing device housed within a chest-style freezer. Mine serves beer, from 5 gallon soda kegs via two Perlick 525SS faucets. All of the plumbing, kegs, and beer serving hardware for this project came from Jeff over at kegcowboy.com. You might be able to find a better deal somewhere, though I sure couldn’t, but you will not find a nicer guy to do business with. If it has anything to do with kegging, my money is going to Keg Cowboy for sure.

The build was actually quite simple, and can be done for far less than I spent on mine. Impatience won out, and I ended up converting a brand new chest freezer rather than scouring classifieds in search of one that wasn’t three tanks of gas away. In short, get a refrigeration device, some kegs, a temperature controller, faucets, a CO2 system, and plumbing for your fluids. Drill some holes for your faucets and hook up your plumbing. Serve beer.

Perlick 525SS faucets

You didn’t really think I was going to leave it at that, did you?

In the interest of not having to post every single image, I’ll do another slideshow, but first a brief rundown of how everything happened.

First, I bought a G.E. chest freezer from Home Depot, along with some sheet metal for my drip tray, black appliance paint, and some textured paint for the collar. I also bought wood to make the collar (a spacer to increase the vertical clearance inside the freezer – and keep me from having to drill through the side of the freezer). When I got that home, I took the lid off the freezer and sanded the whole freezer.

Building the collar was easy, as I already had the dimensions for the top of the freezer and had the 2′x4′ piece of plywood cut when I bought it. Butt joints won today, and were covered up with wood filler and sanded smooth. Just like it never happened. Since I was mounting the lid to the top of the collar, I decided to reinforce where the lid would attach by gluing and screwing another board in at the mounting point. Insulation was next, adhered by my friend Liquid nails. A few moments with a measuring tape and pencil and I had center marks for my faucet holes. Once all of that was finished, I hit the whole collar with sandpaper and washed it off to apply some cool looking textured paint.

While the collar was drying, I hit the freezer with a few coats of black appliance paint. Sadly I got rushed, a little high (from the fumes, people), and ended up with some drips here and there. Attempting to fix those later was an exercise in failure. Sanding a thick, hard, epoxy paint doesn’t work so well. If only I had a sandblaster. Anyway, it still looks pretty decent so I finished the build by drilling a hole for my temperature controller and leaving the probe in a bottle of water. It won’t get cold enough to freeze the bottle, so I didn’t bother with glycol or anything like that.

The only thing that is incomplete, as of this posting, is my drip tray. I bent, with a hammer, sheet metal in to a box and sealed the corners up. Right now, paint is drying. Tomorrow I plan to mount the drip tray to the keezer and post up a final photo. I do have my keg of German Kölsch on tap #1 at this very moment, and do believe it’s a perfect time to go pour myself a glass.

A few days ago I picked up a homebrew kegging setup from Keg Cowboy. Today, I put them to use after getting my CO2 tank filled at Katy Propane. Kegging took far less time from start to finish than bottling.

I took the kegs apart, cleaned everything, replaced the O-rings, and then treated both with some more of my 12.5ppm Iodophor solution. From there the process was a lot like bottling. My priming solution (1/3 cup corn sugar in a cup of water) was added to one of the cleaned and sanitized kegs, and I siphoned the beer from my fermenter to the keg. I did manage to make a pretty huge mess, but I’ll solve that problem with a longer section of tubing before I keg another beer. Now that one of the kegs has beer conditioning inside, I’ve got a week or two to actually finish my keezer build. Better get a move on it.

Kegs + Carrie