Steel-Belted Jockey Box

I thought I'd post some pics of my new Jockey Box. My club (ZZ HOPS) poured at a festival earlier this year but nobody had a JB. Fortunately one of our other local clubs (Lauter Day Brewers) let us borrow theirs for the event. It worked so great that I decided to build one myself.

I love vintage Coleman gear, so I went with an early 70's cooler. It uses a 7-circuit cold plate, with three taps doing a double pass and one doing a single pass. I used 1/4" stainless panel mount unions for the bulkheads. I also made a cold plate holder out of PVC to elevate it above the water produced from the melting ice. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I'll be doing some fine tuning for the line lengths in the upcoming days.

If you're interested, I posted more pics and some more details on my blog, http://www.microbusbrewery.org/2015/11/steel-belted-jockey-box-build.html

 

One more pic, here are all the guts

 

Where'd you get such a clean cooler? That thing looks mint. Any cooler I've had for more that 6 months generally looks like it was at Iwo Jima.

 

Yeah I thought so too...and I only paid $30 for it. It does have a couple minor dings and scratches, but nothing major. The worst is probably the one between faucets 1 and 2.

 

My thoughts exactly. I have a steel belted coleman like this that I picked up at Saver's for $5. It's green, has rust spots all over, and the plastic lining is all yellowed and scratched. It also looks like a previous owner may have tried to do something stupid like cooler cooked corn in it because the insulation on the top is cracked and sagging which made the lid not close so well. The only thing I can think of that probably would have done that is some heat source. I heated it up a bit to reshape it, so it closes now, but it's still cracked and not pretty.

Nice looking Jockey box, you got there, though!

 

Ha, that's classic. Thanks man.

 

I'm interested in whipping together a Jockey box... Everyone I see has around 25-50' of stainless steel coil that does all the work. I see you have, what looks like, a couple feet of tubing?

How well does yours work? Does the beer come out cold? Please educate As if I could go with the tubing it'd be considerably cheaper!

 

Searoe he's using a cold plate in the bottom

Great jockey box!

 

Ahh, didn't see that! That's buddy. I'll have to look into that. Feel free to quote any good threads for reads.

 

Yeah the cold plate didn't photograph very well...kinda washed out. It's a pretty big (and heavy) chunk of aluminum and stainless tubing in there. I did a bunch of honey-do's this past weekend, so I didn't get a chance to test it out. Hoping to do that this weekend.

 

So I finally got around to trying this out tonight at my wife's work Christmas party. It worked well...maybe a little too well. We were only pouring one beer, a blonde coffee milk stout, and it was coming out way too cold. I had it on one of the double pass circuits and probably should have had it on the single pass circuit. The beer was already chilled to about 45F before I drove the thirty minutes to the venue then it sat out another 30 minutes before we started serving. Seeing how well it chilled, I'm thinking this will work awesome for BBQ's, camping trips, etc. I also need to shorten up the lines a tad as I has a little too much resistance.

 

I only do 1 pass, and my beer gets plenty cold. I always chill my kegs first, but I've had them sitting out overnight and I still got cold beer in the morning. As long as you tend to the ice, and don't let the cold plate get submerged in water a single pass does a great job.