Monday 4 August 2014

The beer tap question

The beer cellar location
In the next few weeks, we're going to get into the final stages of the kitchen floor, so it's time to make a decision on something I'd been considering for the past three years: whether or not to install a beer tap in the kitchen. A decision has to be made soon, as it would mean drilling a hole down into the vaulted cellar (the future beer cellar) beneath the kitchen to run a beer line or two up.


The future beer cellar, under the kitchen.


The questions are:

Where in the kitchen would be practical to situate a two-tap font?


On the island is tempting, but too prominent. Beside the sink might be practical, but the hanging cabinet makes it awkward.

Is it really worth it for me alone, and the occasional guest?
My wife is not really a beer drinker, and while I'll have a few beers on the weekends, I try not to over-indulge during the week. Would it be gathering dust most of the time? Do I really want to have to drink most of an 18 litre keg alone?

Would it make me look like an alcoholic?
I think a nice font in the kitchen would be a feature, and a discussion point, and in keeping with my home brewing hobby. But perhaps not quite the right kind of discussion!

There are other solutions.
I will move to kegging my homebrew in the future, but I like having bottles for sharing, or drinking several different beers in one sitting. And for summer parties, I could always build a kegerator and house it in the old pigsty behind the house, which I will convert to a garden room/home brewery in the next couple of years. For personal use, I can always pop downstairs to the cellar to fetch a bottle, or pull a glass. Or sit down there beside the beer tap to hide my problem :)

So what do you think? If you were a beer geek, would you like to have a beer tap in the kitchen?

5 comments:

  1. How often would you need to clean the pipes? If you were to run, say a 6m pipe to the cellar, and only drink one or two beers out of that _and_ have to clean it somehow, it would seem like a lot of work. For a party it would be unbeatable, but how often does that happen and would it happen in the kitchen?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good question. I don't know how often a line like that would require cleaning. Could end up being wasteful if it has to be done before a keg is emptied.

      For parties, or simply visitors, well, the latter might be a couple of times a month, in Summer. Having the "bar" in the kitchen seems ok to me, but in the future, we'll have other options once the pigsty is converted :)

      Delete
  2. I don't think I'd bother. It seems like a lot of effort and if you decide at some point you don't like it or there's a technical problem, you're stuck with it. A service point or bar in the basement really seems like the way to go. For one thing it'll give the beer people somewhere to gather at parties -- you don't want them crowding the kitchen.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. New lyrics: "and you'll always find me in the cellar at parties" :)

      Delete
    2. Stuck in my head now. Thanks for that.

      Delete