John and Troy's Brewery

Today we visited John and Troy and saw the latest addition to their brewery. This chest freezer (aka kegerator) holds kegs, adding a new dimension to their beer brewing. Now, in addition to making bottled beer, they can make kegged beer. The main benefit to making kegged beer is having more control over carbonation.

This is a peek inside the freezer. That's a CO-2 canister (for carbonation) on the right, and to its left are two kegs. As you can see, they have room for more kegs and they are also storing some bottled beer in the freezer.

This is a close-up of one of the kegs. They have a friend whose family owns a snow cone syrup company, and he gave John and Troy a bunch of leftover syrup kegs - which work perfectly well as beer kegs.

John made these two thermostat regulators to keep the kegerator at a constant (and not freezing) temperature, and also to regulate the temperature on a small refrigerator that they use, which I'll describe below.

This is the small refrigerator, aka the fermenter. They had to dismantle the inside of the door so it would close.

Long-term the plan is to build a new top for the freezer and mount taps on the outside, kind of like this.

They grind much of their own malt and I discovered this stash.

They still bottle some beer and they have a supply of old bottles, which they reuse.

We tried both of their kegged beers. This is Troy with their hybrid Weizen Stout.

And John with their Heffe Weizen.