sure. lots of countertop fabricators don't even drill any holes until after the granite is already installed on site.

that's how mine did it. you'll probably have to pay someone a couple hundred bucks to drill a hole, but it can certainly be done with little risk of breaking your stone.

mandogirl - I completely understand your dilemma. My husband brews his own beer (10 gallons at a time). We have tasting parties and 30 people show up so you can imagine the bottles. We bought a stainless steel kegerator and like you said, its like being at a pub. People also use these for soft drinks. You can also have 3 different type drinks hooked up to it.

We are having an outdoor kitchen built and putting it outside. We live in MS so our weather permits it. I called my husband and he said the problem would be running a line that long and keeping the beer at the right temp. He said that the pub he goes to runs it from a refrigerated room.

Good luck! My husband said it was good to see that I was hanging out with people that had their priorities in order!! :)

I just had to laugh at this, as my husband wanted to do the exact same thing in the new kitchen, except he couldn't justify it as we don't drink enough beer, and as he likes real ale it would be forever going bad.

I'd love to get a picture of your setup once it's done. Although I'd probably have to hide it from DH or else we'd end up with one after all :)

My uncle in England, who loves beer more than anybody else I know, built his own pub in his backyard. Needless to say, he's become a very popular man. I imagine you'll find yourself the hit of the neighbourhood if you get this done as well!

can't help but giggle a bit when thinking of a tap being where a soap dispenser usually is..... funny stuff.

Seriously, I think it's a good idea (not where the soap dispenser is!). You should ask whoever is working on your kitchen about options.

Wow...thanks for the replies! Glad to know this is an option without hurting the granite.

remodelqueen...that's the thing...we're not redoing the kitchen. The owners of the house remodeled the kitchen 6 years ago. We'd just be installing the keg gizmo. ;-) Were there room I'd certainly want the whole unit in the kitchen, but there just won't be space for it.

And, as it is, the keg gizmo might not be purchased for a little while as it's a sizeable upfront cost after just moving into the new place. But believe me, as soon as we can do it, that baby will be in our house...even if we have to trudge down to the basement to get a beer for a while before we cut holes in cabinets & counter top to run the tube through.
But I promise that when we do have our "kitchen pub" set up (oh, the joy) I will post a picture here.

dpirsock-- How cool that you have a brewery in your own house. My dream come true. Yeah...we thought that the beer in the length of tube would get warm, but a friend told us about a kind of cooling-wire you can get that can wrap around the tubing. I don't know enough about it yet to know if that would work well. I assume it wouldn't be nearly as cold as what's in the keg, but, hey, at an average of 22 cents a pint, it wouldn't be that horrible to pour whatever's stuck in the tube down the drain to get at the cold stuff. What brand of kegerator do you have? I was looking at the Sears Kenmore one for around $700. Where do you have yours set up now, while you're waiting for your outdoor kitchen?

Thanks, guys.
- mando

I might want to leave it in the basement to force myself to run off some of the calories! ;-)

Do you always drink one kind of beer? We simply don't drink enough to warrant a keg, but I was thinking of the fact that we like to try different kinds/have different kinds on hand, which wouldn't work if we had it in a keg.

This sounds like a fun idea, though. Best wishes on getting it to work.

We do like many kinds of beer. But we also get in ruts of buying one kind...sort of like the everyday beer. Then once in a while we'll get something special (while we still have the everyday beer around).
Lately we've been enamored of Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat, which is available year-round despite it being a Wheat. Pretty inexpensive, not too heavy alchohol-wise, and very tasty. A good everyday beer. We'd be very happy having this in a keg.

A treat, however, is Rogue Deadguy Ale. We only got this a couple times when there was a good rebate going on at our area distributors (in PA we have beer distributors, which I actually really like, as there's great variety to be found there). We'd probably once in a while still buy a case of "treat beer" as Christmas or B-day gifts to one another. But with a keg of everyday stuff around, we'd save money and accumulate fewer bottles to recycle.

Okay, so it's the size of a dishwasher or a 24in base cabinet.

It might not be all that much work to put one in. You just need to sacrifice a bit of storage space.

In the mean time, have you considered a mini-kegerator? It could just sit on the countertop next to the coffeemaker. ;-)

mandogirl - I don't know nearly as much as my dh but what I do know is that you can actually make one out of a chest freezer. They sell the kits.

He has his in the garage which is only a few steps from the kitchen. He actually wanted to put it in the dining room. I had to put my foot down. We have a walk in closet that is filled from the top to bottom of different types.

Sam's Club has them for $499 for 5.8 cf - Danby brand. I think it holds 1/2 or 1/4 barrel kegs.

I like beer occasionally but love wine. If only he could learn how to make the grapes grow in our part of the country!

Good luck! Send pictures if you decide to do it! :)

"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Benjamin Franklin

I dunno.

Talk to your favorite beer bartender about what a keg needs to keep it happy. You do want a happy keg, right?

I have a beer-loving friend who got a kegerator as a present, and just he and his friends couldn't keep up with it, week in week out. Too often it would go off enough that it was not a pleasure to drink. Not every time, but enough that he started to back off it after draining off a bunch of keg ends.

And if you can get the exact tasty beer you want in a can each time, why drink sub-optimum beer? (That's his theory. My words.)

Ask the bartender how long a keg of the kind of beer you like really stays GOOD. And if and where you can get the kinds you intend to buy retail. And ask about cleaning and maintenance issues, buying parts, service, etc.
Get a few opinions from bars that really care about beer.

At the least, you may get some tips on how to do it the right way.

My friend only uses his for parties now, when he has a whole bunch of people over.

Good luck.

If you buy a commercial set up, you'll pay a substantial premium, and since you're mounting the cooler remotely, you don't benefit from it. If you (or your husband) are at all handy, it's not hard to make one. Any fridge big enough to fit a keg into can be made to work; there are kits to convert chest freezers, but as a half barrell weighs ~160 lbs, and a quarter barrel ~90, it's a pain to lift them in.
Making your own also makes it easier to have multiple beers on tap.

Some measurements:
A half barrel keg is 16.125 inches in diameter, and just under 24" tall. A quarter barrel is the same diameter (there are some that are covered in rubber, miller likes them, and a bit wider) and half the height. There are also 1/6 barrel kegs, which are about 9" in diameter, and hold about 50 bottles worth of beer. You can fit two in the space of a half-barrel, and three or four in a standard sized fridge. What you can get in them varies widely by region, but there are fair number of microbreweries that do them (because you can fit one in the wasted space of a cooler that holds a couple half-barrels). There's also a slim quarter, which is the height of a half, but only about 12" in diameter. I've never actually seen one, so I don't know who uses them.

The sixth barrel, if you can find beer you like in them, is a good choice for at home. It's not a huge quanity of beer to drink before it goes bad.

I think it's a great idea! I hope you can make it work. DH has always wanted a kegerator - of course then he would probably make us bring back kegs of Yuengling every time we went to PA (he's from there). ;-) Love that Rogue ale.

Be sure to post pictures!

mandogirl, I think you might have misunderstood your friend when he talked about a "wire" that could keep the tube running from the keg cold. They make wires that can generate heat but the only way to generate cold would be using a tube circulating refrigerant from a condenser. In other words, you'd need (probably separate) refrigeration system that would dispense cold freon into perhaps a 1/4" tube that would be spiral-wrapped around the beer tube all the way to the tap. Both tubes would then be wrapped with insulation. At the tap, the refrigerant tube would make a U-turn and return to the condenser unit but, because it would now be carrying the heat from the beer tube, it would be run outside of the insulation so as not to re-heat the beer. This sounds like it would be a fairly expensive proposition to install and would add to your electric bill with a second condenser running (refrigerators are often the largest single users of electricity in the home...cool ain't cheap!).

Cheers!

Bob

I'm having my granite installed next week. I was told I could have as many holes drilled as I wanted, but in the future it would be $30 per hole because it would be a seperate service call. So I don't think it's a problem to get the hole drilled now.

As for storing your keg in the basement, I see bartenders all the time running downstairs to switch lines so that's how it's done in many bars. I think your idea is neat. As for hubby and I, we don't drink "fancy" beers. Hubby found out long ago that he goes into anaphalytic shock (scary) when he drinks grained brewed beers. The only one he can drink without that effect is Budweiser Lite which is rice brewed. Now that he found one that won't kill him he doesn't stray!

Crazy? Crazy cool!

Dh said our kegerator wasn't hard to clean at all. He uses it daily. Maybe it's the type we have but I wouldn't worry about the clean up.

If you are doing it to save money on beer, your savings may go into electricity.

Does your kitchen share a wall with your garage, or laundry room? Our friends put their keg in a fridge in the laundry room and somehow configured the tap/tubing to go out the back - the back is a wall in their basement behind the bar. All you see on the wall is a tap. They call it the "Magic Wall." When you're in the laundry room, you just open the fridge door to reload the half barrel. Because it backs right up to the bar, you don't have that great length of tubing to worry about cooling.

Hi again, and wow, thanks for all the replies! And montalvo, thanks for that info re: the cooling wire. That sounds more complicated/expensive than it's worth.
I have a feeling that when we do get our kegerator, it and the tap will live in the basement for a while. That's a great idea, cincyj, about recessing the unit into a wall...unfortunately there's no convenient spot off the kitchen for it to go.
Maybe years down the road we could do something creative like make a Harry Potter-esque cupboard under the stairs, put the kegerator in there, and feed the tubing through the wall...that wouldn't be that far for the tube to travel to the kitchen...it just wouldn't be near the sink. We'll see!
We're thinking that the kegerator will be our Christmas present to each other...how romantic!...to me, anyway ;-) Jewelry?...no thanks, honey, I'd rather have beeeeer. Mmmmmm. ;-)
- mando

I love beer. I really do.

But how many ounces a day would you have to consume to make such a system really worthwhile? I'm pretty certain I don't come close, as the only drinker in the house.

It would be nice to hear from someone who was still using thiers after several years, when the novelty has well worn off...

I love it. Think of it as "going green".

I'm pretty certain my dh, neighbors, family and friends surpass the level of ounces daily to make it worthwhile. Since he brews, we have Belgium Wheats, American Amber, German Kolsch and German Stouts. I get the clear plastic glasses so no clean up.

I wouldn't mind using it for soda drinks when we have my son's birthday party.

Grommets drilled in our granite were $23 each. We then put those plastic cover things in them that we purchased from Office Depot. They are typically used for the hole in your desk top to slide your computer electrical cord through.

My husband brews his own beer and stores it in kegs rather than bottles. The kegs he uses are tall and narrow, like soda comes in. He "made" a kegerator out of a mini-fridge, and it is under our old island countertop, which we put in the basement when we remodeled our kitchen. Apparently, there is only one kind of fridge that is tall enough for the kegs he uses. He had to cut a hole in the top of the fridge for the taps. And, yes, he has to go downstairs every time he wants a beer.

{{!gwi}}

Hi, again, everyone.
oruboris, we drink a lot of beer. We buy a case a week easy on a normal basis...sometimes we go through a case faster than a week. A case of a a nice but not too pricey wheat beer we've been drinking lately is $30 tax included.
With a keg of the same beer, factoring in the CO2 cost, a pint averages at 22 cents a piece. A kegerator for us would pay for itself in probably 6 months. Yahoo!
Great setup, uxorial!
;-)

mandogirl - did you ever end up having this done? I'm about to embark on a kitchen remodel and we're going to be installing taps somewhere in the kitchen. Haven't decided on the exact location yet, and I'm having a hard time finding pics from people who have done this. I'm contemplating putting the taps in the island and having them next to the prep sink to catch the drips, but I'm not sure if it would look weird having a regular faucet + the beer taps around the one sink.

Otherwise, I was contemplating having a bar-style drip tray installed underneath the beer taps, but I don't know if that's worth the extra effort/space when I could just put them around the sink.

Anyhow, if you did end up going for it and have pics I'd really appreciate if you could post one.

Thanks!