Keg! Nate!

Ok, the subject line is kind of a joke - there was an episode of Gilmore Girls once titled "Keg! Max!" So, I'm just playing on that.

But this post is about our new keg system!

Nate decided bottling beer is, well, for lack of better words...a giant pain in the behind! All bottles must be washed and sanitized. Then you have to sanitize all the bottling equipment. The beer is then transfered to your bottling bucket and you're ready to bottle - which then takes another hour or so to do. Not to mention the fact that the cleaning and sanitizing of bottles can take days.

Kegging beer takes maybe an hour for one batch. Perhaps less once he gets the hang of it. And once it's kegged, it is only about a week before you can start drinking the beer. With bottling, conditioning can take more like three weeks.

So anyway, Nate seriously weighed the pros and cons and decided kegging would be a good direction to go. It's a bit of an investment to get started, but will save us money and time in the long run.

He purchased his kegs nearly two months ago and slowly added the parts and pieces needed to get started. Finally he was ready to buy the biggest piece - the container in which he would keep the kegs cold. He read up on how to set up a deep freezer to be a keggerator. It involves bypassing the temperature controls so it can be a slightly warmer temperature. We had to do alot of searching to find a freezer that would fit in our basement, but finally found a good option and had it delivered last Friday.

Saturday Nate hooked up all the necessary pieces to get the kegs up and running - and we now have three kegs of beer, no waiting. We've sampled all three and they're not bad. Now the next steps will be to rebuild our bar around the freezer. For now, we may end up just throwing a couple of shelves up above the freezer for various alcohol and glassware. Our old bar needs to go, not sure what we're going to do with that yet. So the basement is a bit of a mess. But it will all be worth it.

Nate's so excited and it makes me happy to see him so happy. And I have to say, kegged beer tastes just as good as the bottled beer. Hopefully this will help us enjoy our homebrew for many years to come. AND I may attempt to make my own soda! So stay tuned!