CNYBrew.com: Little help

Friday, May 09, 2008

Little help

So I'm looking for a little help in identifying this thing and trying to figure out what to do with it. A good friend of mine was garage hitting the local garage sale circuit when he came across this. now from the looks of it, it's a wine distributor. It's from a bar in Hamilton and has 8 plastic taps on it. The spurs are all plastic, bit the hammers and other parts on the taps are metal.


As you can see, there is a refrigerator built into the bottom half.
The taps go from the spur into a dip tube that runs through a bung. The bungs share a CO2 in that connects to a gas quick release valve (pretty bad ass to see quick release valves that small).

Each of the units has a mini Co2 regulator that seems to have the pressure regulated by a little turn thing on the bottom. There is a label on the front of both units that says "Premier Cru".

The bottom unit is built around a mini refrigerator, but this is not a home made project, it looks like the freezer in the unit is built much differently than I have seen before. I didn't get a picture, but it's built on it's side.


The door to the fridge has a glass from (double pane) and is totally sealed with refrigerator trim. The door itself seals tight and the fridge still works.


To be honest with you, the whole thing looks like it would work fine. I think the bungs need to be changed, but otherwise it's money. I am just deciding if it's something I can use for beer, or if it's wine only. The other thing I am wondering is if you leave wine on tap that is run with C02, does it go bad?

4 comments:

A Brewer said...

Any plans on how you would even manage using it for beer? It looks too small to fit anything directly into the fridge other than single beer bottles. On the other hand if you just ran new lines to kegs elsewhere you would have a nice prebuilt tap setup.

A Brewer said...

Also if you are going to use it for wine I don't think CO2 would be the best unless you are going to have a sparkling wine of some kind in there. I know to keep wine from going bad after opening there are several inert gases (argon and nitrogen) and gas mixes you can pump in to prevent oxidation so maybe that was something that was originally hooked up here.

Kevin LaVoy said...

Is there any way to run the beer lines through the fridge section? You may be able to maybe put one of those cold plates in it, and treat it like some sort of jockey box.

Travis said...

Brewer - I was wondering if there were any issues with using CO2. I was told that Nitro and argon were more common, bit no one said that CO2 was a no-go.

Kevin - I don't think that i am going to make any major alterations. It's pretty nice and I am sure there is some wine-o out there that would love this thing. i figure I'll get it cleaned up and test the market. It seems really nice and it would be a shame to rip it up.

The other factor here is that I already have 3 beers on tap so having growlers on tap would be a little wacky (even for me).

thanks for the feedback.