DIY Jockey Box: Crafting Your Beer Keg Cooler Made Easy

CoolersOnSale.com is here for our first DIY video. Today, we are going to be making a jockey box. For those that don’t know, a jockey box is basically a way to cool keg beer without having to physically chill the keg.

The keg would sit outside the cooler, the lines run into the cooler, we have coils inside the cooler, and that chills the beer so that when it comes out the tap, it’s cold.

Let’s take a look on the inside. This is a done-for-you kit by Micromatic. You can pick this up online.

As you can see, at the back, we have a port here where the beer would be coming in. It runs through these coolers which we would have ice on top of, and then when it comes out the tap, the beer is ice-cold.

Today, we’re going to be moving the insides of this cheap Igloo cooler over to a roto molded cooler. This is one of the first Siberian coolers that we tested on CoolersOnSale.com. We’re going to be moving all the insides over to the Siberian.

You’re going to see start to finish how to make a jockey box. You can pick up all these parts online.

So, without further ado, we’re going to get into it. To make a jockey box, the first thing we’re going to do is obviously map out where we want this. We decided we wanted to go right here.

Be cognizant of how long the shank is to make sure that this is going to fit all the way through the cooler. So we just checked that, it looks like it’s going to fit through there, so we are going to mount the tap right here.

Go ahead and draw the inside or at least draw a hole where we want that to drill so we can draw a pilot hole. That’s where we’re going to be putting the tap. We’re gonna drill a pilot hole first and then we’ll go ahead and use the hole saw which is one-in-eight. Now we’ll hit this with a 1 1 & 8.

Alright, there you go. And you get to see what’s on the inside of a rotomolded cooler as well. A bunch of foam. We got a PVC insert here and then the shank goes through that and on the inside, a rubber washer.

Now go ahead and stick the shank through and finish up.

Goopy thing, you can see how much goop I got on there. A lot. Seal it up. We’re gonna have a rubber seal on there but it’s always good to just go ahead and seal it all the way up.

Good. Alright, we’re tight on the back so now we’re gonna go ahead and drill on the back side for the intake.

Make sure you have enough room even when the lid’s open so we’re gonna go somewhere right around here. I guess we should be even on that side, right around here. It doesn’t have to be perfect, this is the back side so we’ll go ahead and put a dot right there.

Draw a pilot hole, drill a pilot hole like we did last time. Now come with the 1/8 inch.

Next, we’ll put the sleeve in. Alright, make sure the shank’s gonna work out. Sure. Now if we got plenty of room on both sides so we’ll go aheadand caulk this up, seal it up with the rubber washer as well as the nuts, and then we’ll be on to the next step.

So now we’re ready to go ahead and put on the tap right here. Alright, now we’re ready to go ahead and start assembling the lines and the regulator. These are the coils that fit right in here, and you can play with these to obviously get them right.

So this cooler, we could actually fit two different taps. That’s why we put it on this side so if we want to put another tap in here. So obviously, we’re going to set the coils off to this side so we leave room for another tap on this side if we want. So you could have two taps in one cooler.

We’ll go ahead and connect the lines like in the back. Alright, so now we’re going to go ahead and start hooking up the hoses on the back.

This is obviously the attachment for the kegs so we’ll hook up the line here, slide the clamp down, squeeze it on there, and that’s it. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Red goes with red here.

So it turns out that you can’t use keg beer with an empty CO2 tank. So fast forward a couple of days and a full CO2 tank in about thirty-five degrees cooler temperatures and we have a full CO2 tank.

We are going to go ahead and hook up the CO2 and tap the keg and we should be underway.

We can also adjust the pressure on this regulator so we use a screwdriver to adjust the pressure I believe to 35 pounds. Definitely got some pressure now so we need to dial this back down to 35 pounds.

As you can see, I don’t know how well that’s going to come out on video but we’re dropping down from we’re about 50 now we’re back down to 35 pounds and no leaks.

Alright, we just added ice on the inside. The coils are starting to sweat and we are obviously chilling this down so we are ready for the moment of truth. We’re gonna go ahead and pour a couple of beers.

Alright, it’s the moment of truth. We’re going to pour our first beer. We got the coils all iced down. We got the pressure right on the CO2 tanks so we’ll see how our jockey box works out. Perfect, not much foam. It seems like a perfect pour. It’s obviously ice-cold.

Give it the most important part, the taste test. Wow, that’s really, really cold….

We’ll also go over the ready-made jockey boxes if you want to buy one ready-made. We have those online as well.

Thanks for watching. Subscribe, give us a thumbs up. It’s what helps us to keep going. I’ll be back next time for more video reviews.

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