No room for kegerator, Jocky box or bottles?

I've been battling with the question of "keg or bottle" on my latest batch and I've decided to seek some advice. I can get a free corney keg and use a CO2 bottle from work, so I'd just need fittings, hose, a regulator, tap and some new o-rings to keg my beer. I'm willing to cask condition the beer instead of force carb, since I don't have room for a fridge for my beer, but to drink it cold I'd need a jockey box, which costs as much or more than a used fridge to make a kegerator out of and I'd have to keep it iced whenever I want to use it.

My question to all of you is whether you think it would be worth kegging instead of bottling if you didn't have a fridge to put the keg in and dispense from?

I'm also wondering if using hose instead of stainless coils for the jockey box would be dumb. I imagine that the expansion of the hose under pressure and/or the exposure to that much plastic would be a detriment to my beer or dispensing. It may not even cool the beer as well, I think plastic/rubber is a better insulator of heat than stainless steel would be.

Should I wait until I have room for a kegerator before I start to keg my beer? What would you do?

I'm actually trying to figure out the same thing. On one hand, kegging makes it so I don't need to bottle. On the other, the only way for me to get cold beer would to be to set up a tub with ice and park the keg in it. works for parties, not so much for home dispensing.

Hopefully "santa" will get me a kegerator and a keg set up, so I don't have to worry about these problems. Then I can just get a bottling gun and when I wanna take homebrew other places, I can.

At the moment, I don't plan on going the keg route, simply for the fact that I don't wanna drink warm beer. It may be acceptable in other parts of the world, but not in anaheim.

I wouldn't do it... It's not like jockey boxes are exactly cheap (starting at $160 at micromatic, and you still need hookups, CO2, etc) and that's a lot of money you could have put toward a proper kegerator. For that much you should be able to get a used chest freezer and also get started on buying some of the 'plumbing' for it. Not to mention, I think it would be a pretty poor solution - having to keep adding ice all the time...

You'd end up dropping so much money on ice and the jockey box itself... plus, you lose the main convenience of HAVING kegged beer, being able to pull a pint whenever you want.

You really don't have room for a Sanyo 4912? Austin Homebrew's got a special running on a tower right now, too.

I am in the same boat and posted a similar Q last week. Same answers as you are getting. I was wondering if you could make your own jockey box using thin copper pipe coil in a cooler with ice. Keep the cooler small, for a beer or 2.
What I am going to do is cask condition at cellar temps(60F) then move into a really cold room in my basement, 50F for serving temps. This will work for the winter but when late spring arrives I will be back to square1.
As far as price goes I think the cheapest is to score free fridge off of craigslist. I don't want to use that much extra energy for a couple of beers each night but might be forced.

Most hose materials are insulators and will not perform in a jockey box. Also, once you have kegs and a box, how is that smaller than a kegger?

Although copper is relatively inert to beer and works fine for wort chillers, I don't think you'd want to leave beer in copper tubing for long periods.

I'd stick to bottles for now.

Taket the free corny. Clean it up with oxyclean, buy an Oring set.

Take the free CO2 tank, what, is it going to spoil?

Fill your clean, disinfected corny with CO2.

Price posts and tubing.

Open your fridge door and scratch your belly. You'll need to move some stuff around in your fridge now.

Imagine 4 cornies set up 2x2.

Build a "box" that fits over them. We're talking 2 feet by 2 feet. That's all. Just two feet by two feet. Now, put a refrigerator on top of that box. You don't need to fit a carboy in that refrigerator, so the smallest 1.7 cu ft model will be perfectly fine and you should be able to get one for $35 on any college campus after the semester ends. This is substantially smaller than the space you'd need for an actual kegerator. You are still only using 2'x2' of floor space. Now put a cold plate in the fridge and 2 taps in the door.

Now you have two taps, space for a spare carboy, and the CO2 bottle. Total space required: 2 square feet. That's my plan anyway....

So now, are you sure you can't spare two square feet? I can't imagine a jockey box taking up less space than that.

Sir Humpsalot said:

So now, are you sure you can't spare four square feet? I can't imagine a jockey box taking up less space than that.

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Ya know, you could skip the box, set the fridge straight on the four kegs, and rig a "jockey box like apparatus" inside the fridge. Maybe.

Poindexter said:

Open your fridge door and scratch your belly. You'll need to move some stuff around in your fridge now.

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My CO2 had only been hooked to the keg for, ummm, about 15 minutes here. So it isn't carbed yet but I am WILD about the concept.

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Poindexter said:

Ya know, you could skip the box, set the fridge straight on the four kegs, and rig a "jockey box like apparatus" inside the fridge. Maybe.

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I could be wrong, but I doubt that coils in refrigerated air would cool quickly enough to have any usefulness. You'd need a material with much higher thermal conductivity between the freon and the beer. Basically a chiller plate....

The mini fridge on top of a SOFC like box is a great idea for those who have access to a fridge that's too small for use as a kegerator. Add a 12v fan to move air and it should work just nearly as well as a 4912.

pldoolittle said:

I could be wrong, but I doubt that coils in refrigerated air would cool quickly enough to have any usefulness. You'd need a material with much higher thermal conductivity between the freon and the beer. Basically a chiller plate....

The mini fridge on top of a SOFC like box is a great idea for those who have access to a fridge that's too small for use as a kegerator. Add a 12v fan to move air and it should work just nearly as well as a 4912.

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I was thinking about a chiller plate soaking in a couple gallons of cooking oil... or maybe heavily-salted water (though corrosion would be a problem there).

The more I think about the mini-fridge idea, the more I like it in conjunction with a larger fridge (space permitting, of course). Stick your two most popular cornies in the fridge. Serve the 2 others from room temperature through a cold plate.

Thanks for the responses. I have recently been realizing that the size differences between the jockeybox and a mini fridge are pretty minimal. I just need to convince myself that a kegerator is more important than one of my arcade machines. I have the patience, search skills, and luck to usually find free parts or major components for hobby projects (two arcade cabinets without spending any money on the cabinets themselves) so I am sure I could hold out for a fridge or freezer that would work.

Until I have more room though, I think it's bottles for the batch that's going to be in search of a home soon. I suppose I'll keep my eyes out for the parts and if I get a small enough fridge for free before I bottle this batch I'll make room.

It ends up being a thermal mass equation, correct?

If you have two coils, each holding 1 pint of beer, and both coils are in a tank containing two gallons of liquid "xyz" and the tank is inside a refrigerator with a cooling capacity of "abc", then how often can SHaL draw two pints at 50°F?

I suppose the room temp is another of the variables...

But clearly the place to go big or go home is the tank holding liquid xyz. If you can run that from 2 gallons up to 5 gallons and wait for the liquid to cool down before you start, then you have a bunch of thermal momentum in the system against the evening you choose to have 8 or 9 pints of something out of the room temp keg.

BFauska said:

I think it's bottles for the batch that's going to be in search of a home soon.

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Bottles are really good for anything you want to ship, and anything you want to age.

My 080808RIS is getting bottled. That what doesn't ship is getting aged.

My next session beer is getting kegged so I don't have to screw around with bottles.

IMHO, it is not worth kegging if you do not have a fridge for cold storage or a kegerator. I got lucky and inherited most of my expensive pieces, so I started off kegging and using a jockey box to serve.

The problem is, if you do not store your beer cold it will come out of the Jockey Box very cloudy and full of sediment. This may or may not be a concern for you, but I knew that I wanted my beer to be all it can be.

I finally got a kegerator off of Craigslist a couple of months ago, and I am now in brewers heaven! I can pour a pint anytime I want one, and it comes out crystal clear like a comercially produced beer.

Bottom Line:
I would recomend sticking to botteling until you have a dedicated beer fridge or kegerator. Cold storage is the way to go if you want great beer.