DIY Time at the Olsen House

As you well know by now, we’ve been home brewing beer for the past four years.  Every time we brew, we boil all of the ingredients together, pitch the yeast, send the solution through primary and secondary fermentation, and then we bottle the beer.  We bottle condition our beer, which means we add priming sugar to the finished beer, then place it into individual bottles and cap them.  They sit there for 2-3 weeks, during which they eventually carbonate as the yeast in the beer eats through the bottling sugar and excretes the CO₂ that gives us the bubbles in the beer. 

Tiny bubbles…

There are a few large scale breweries that also bottle condition their beer, and Sierra Nevada is one of the best known.  Other breweries force CO₂ into their beer during the bottling process, so the carbonated beer actually goes into the can or bottle to make it ready for drinking.  Home brewers can replicate this by kegging their beer and linking it up to a CO₂ canister, so it can pour off a tab (this is what restaurants with taps do as well). 

In the past, we’ve stuck to bottle conditioning our beer, as it’s cheaper and takes up less fridge space than kegging.  There’s also a certain amount of expense connected to kegging beer, and we generally don’t drink any beer quickly enough to keep five gallons of it on tap at any one point in time.  We also like to give beer away to friends and family, and it’s hard to do so when it’s in a keg as opposed to a cute little 12 ounce bottle.

Totes adorbs.

Although our beers normally work out pretty well, we had one that did not carbonate, no matter what we did to it.  It was a barleywine, and it took (seemingly) a million pounds of malt to make, so it represented a fair investment in time and money.  In a last ditch attempt to save it, we took up the offer of a friend to put it on tap at his place, to be bottled once the proper attachments were procured.  When we went over to his place to bottle it, the attachment didn’t work so well, and we were once again at risk of pouring the majority of our (delicious when carbonated, not so much when flat as a pancake) beer down the drain.

Instead, we decided to take the jump into kegging, so we could full enjoy the fruits of our labor.  We debated between buying an actual kegerator and converting our garage fridge* into one.  On the one hand, a new kegerator would arrive to our house already set up and would allow us to keep the garage fridge open for any needed space for items like Thanksgiving turkeys and most importantly, more beer.  On the downside, it would cost $200 more and be yet another drain on our electricity bill.**  

Converting the existing fridge would be cheaper and allow us to use our existing materials, but we’d lose storage in that fridge.  After much deliberation and online price comparisons, we went with converting the existing fridge.  We found a decent price on a kit online and sent in our order.

During a weekend in early August, the rains blew in and made the garage less than 110 degrees, so we started the project.  We first unloaded everything out of the fridge and took some measurements:

Look at all that glorious beer!

Because every house needs a yardstick

Fitting the CO₂ canister

After ensuring our placement was correct, it was time for the power tools!  We borrowed an attachment from a friend at work for the drilling of the holes.

A man and his power tools…

Here we go!

Always wear your safety goggles.

Success!

Next, we fit the tap spouts to the connector through the holes in the door (we purchased a two-tap system).

The spouts being affixed

From the inside - 

Who needs a butter drawer, anyway?

The base of our fridge is uneven, where a graduated square is cut out of the middle of the plastic bottom.   Since a keg wouldn’t be able to sit flat on the bottom, we pondered a few ways to fix this.  We settled on piping plastic caulk in rows to the recessed bottom, in the attempt to level things out and give the kegs something tacky to hold on to.

Getting ready to go!

Check out the toes in the bottom right corner - 

those are the toes of a helper!

All done!

After visiting our friend and obtaining the keg with the barleywine, we brought it back to our house and set up the hosing for the system.  First, we sanitized.

In the most sanitary spot in the house, obviously

We then connected the hosing from tap handle to keg then from keg to gas canister.

Hooking up the hosing to the canister and regulator

We found that when the door of the fridge would close, the lower door shelf would knock the keg back and forth, so we solved that problem with a bit of elbow grease.

And a hacksaw.

Ain’t nothing that can’t be solved with a hacksaw.

Finishing hooking things up!

To celebrate the conversion to kegging, we decided to put some of the money we saved on converting the existing fridge into ordering custom tap handles from a seller I found on Etsy, Jerry’s Wood Working.  After a day or so of trading emails with the very prompt and helpful Jerry himself, our order was placed, the money was transferred, and the tap handles were put into the queue.  Jerry gave us status updates through Facebook and finally, the tap handles were on their way to us!***

Ta da!

Aren’t they gorgeous?

They’re made from two different types of wood affixed together, and they have chalkboard tops, so we can label the taps, but then wipe off the writing and reuse the chalkboards when we change out the brews.  Additionally, since our brewery name is “Hair of The Dog AZ,” we asked Jerry to burn small paw prints around the top of the handle.  See?

Cute, right?

Okay, who wants a pint?  Come over and see us, and we’ll hook you up!

Later!

Amy

* Procured from the Sears Scratch and Dent Outlet for a mere $100 a few years back.  It’s a treasure.

** Which was heart-stoppingly high last month, and we’re pretty darn frugal about our power.

*** In about 5 weeks, start to finish, which seems reasonable to me for a completely custom product.