The Keg Fridge Is Dead... Long Live the Keg Fridge!

I have been using an old top-freezer fridge for my 4 kegs, served with picnic taps.

Recently I saw a photo of a side-by-side fridge with 4 tap handles on the front, and had the idea to take the side-by-side fridge sitting in my garage and make it the new keg fridge.

I even bought a shank and faucet. Saturday I installed the faucet and plugged in the fridge and started thinking about how to get it up and running with gas manifold and all the kegs and everything.

Today fortune told me it was time to ditch the old fridge.

I kicked a keg and it was time to move in a new one that was sitting and waiting "on deck". So I picked up the keg of Big Time Dubbel and put it down on the spot vacated by Yachtoberfest prototype 1. So far so good.

Then it was time to see how the carbonation was coming along. So I pressed the liquid QD on to the newly placed keg... and SMASH! The shelf holding that keg, one other keg, and four jars of harvested yeast came crashing down.

Fortunately only one of the yeast jars was actually glass, and even more fortunately it held S-04, which I am not planning to use again any time soon. But it immediately became clear that the time to put the new keg fridge into service was now.

So... an hour or two later, I've cleaned up most of the glass shards and moved everything out of the old fridge into the new one. I just can't help but be afraid the new fridge's shelf is going to fail, given what's just happened to me. And I'm wondering if I should/could move the newly filled fridge into the position occupied by the old fridge once the old one is moved out. I think it will fit, but rolling it around all full of kegs and all seems a bit risky...

Long Live the Fridge!

I would suggest ditching the built in shelves in your fridge and building some custom ones out of wood. The shelves in your fridge were never meant to hold a couple of 5 gallon kegs (which will weigh in at probably 90+ lbs if the kegs are full).