Kegerator Part 2: Planning

Once we knew we were going to get a chest freezer, the hardest part was deciding on how we wanted the kegerator to look. We both knew we didn’t want to have the taps coming out the side of the chest freezer as the look wasn’t right for us, so that left getting some sort of tower on top. Towers aren’t cheap, but we found a very good deal on a stainless steel “T” tower with 4 taps. We toyed around with the idea of trying to build something, but rationality won, and we nixed that idea. We decided to go with 4 taps after doing some fitting with our current kegs. We wanted to store the 20-lb CO2 inside the kegerator to hide it, so that left enough room for comfortably fit 5 kegs. With 5 kegs inside, we decided to not do 5 taps, that way with 4 on tap, the extra spot could be a carbonating keg to be “on deck” as soon as it was needed.

As for the top and sides of the unit, we must have spent a week scouring the internet for pictures of other people’s kegerators to get some inspiration. We eventually found a really nice picture of one with a tiled top and wood around all the sides (on further research, it turns out he had a vanity that he tiled on top and ran the beverage lines in from the basement below). You can see the picture below, but we used this as a general model for our project.

We had some rough sketches of the unit with measurements of various aspects of the freezer. We could then start sizing tiles, borders, paneling, etc.

Next we went to Lowes to pick out tile and try to game plan on what we were going to do with the sides and front. We thought we were pretty lucky when we found some wainscoting that fit perfectly for the front of the unit without any cutting. Our plan was to just glue it on the front and then paint it a nice dark espresso color. For the sides we planned to attach some plain boards and then frame the front corners to complete the look.

Unfortunately, upon further research, we learned that it’s not the best idea to glue wood to the front/sides of a chest freezer. When the compressor turns on, it actually dissipates heat through the front and side walls of the unit. If we were to glue directly to the walls,  it would be harder for the heat to escape and you can stress the compressor out and potentially shorten its life. To avoid that, we’ll have to separate the walls of the chest freezer with our wood paneling by at least 1-inch.

We’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to do that and still make it look good, so for now, we just focused on the top of the freezer. It had been about a week since we drank any draft beer (which is too long in the Dietrich house, especially during football season), so we decided to finish the top and then deal with the sides later. With the tile picked out, we were ready to go.