Kegging and Beer Cellar

[nickofosho]

I'm just jumping into the wonderful world of kegging and am making sure I have all of my ducks in a row before my next brew.

I obviously need to chill the kegged beer before enjoying it and am weighing my options of how to go about doing this.

I have a converted chest freezer that is being used as a ferm chamber and don't want to give that up, so my current plan is to get another fridge or freezer for chilling my new keg. I'd also like to create some sort of beer cellar for keeping specials beers happy, around 55 degrees, as they age (I'm in Los Angeles and the daily temperature fluctuation can be significant).

My idea is to get a side by side fridge and use a temp controller on the fridge side to keep that at 55 degrees for the cellar beers and hopefully the freezer side would chill down to 40-ish degrees for the keg.

Anybody have any experience with this or any better ideas? Thanks!

 

[normonster]

I looked into getting a side by side as well but shied away because to do what I wanted Id need dual compressors and those commercial ones are thousands. Regular fridge might do what you want. If it were too cold you could install some type of adjustable vent - manual control or pimp with a temp controller opening the hatch when temp drops too far.