How To Brew Beer In A Kegerator

Transcript: Okay so here’s the deal i’m gonna brew a beer and then i’m gonna serve it on this kegerator. But i’m also gonna ferment the beer in the kegerator as well. This thing also makes great seltzer water.

So before we can make use of the kegerator, still need to brew the beer and to make that wort. I’ve got my grains here and this beer style; Grisette – it’s native to the mining regions of france and belgium.

And it’s really a sort of a derivative of a farmhouse style ale or a sort of a saison type beer, but it has a much higher wheat malt content which you can see here.

And Grisette literally translated means ‘little gray one.’

But that is not going to refer to the color of this beer. This is going to be a pretty pale color beer and aiming for an srm here just around three.

Mashing this one at 150 fahrenheit or 66 celsius. 

So this is a kegerator provided to me by new air it’s basically like a mini fridge. To fit kegs i’ve got two corny kegs in here, um, those connect up to this tower with a single tap but as you could see there’s room for two kegs. 

So you could upgrade this tower perhaps and have two taps as well. There’s some temperature control on the front and then on the back we have a co2 canister and that runs through a hole in the back. And it did actually provide a second hole in the back here for upgrades that might come in handy a little bit

This was designed for commercial kegs, but it was very easy to adapt this to work with corny kegs.

What i want to do today is to not just serve stuff out of here but to use this as a fermentation chamber as well. 

As for the recipe for today’s beer, this is quite a sessionable beer looking at an original gravity of 1.040 so around 4.2 percent.

And in the grist is 63% of six row malt and that is combined with 25% of pale wheat malt and 12% of flaked oats. And the fermentation of vessel of choice for today is a corny keg. 

This is going to be perfect to fit into the kegerator um i have modified this corny keg just slightly so the dip tubeis actually slightly shorter. I just took a dremel and just took off maybe the last inch of the dip tube.

This is a regular dip tube let’s see the difference there just a little shorter and the reason for the shorter dip tube is because as the beer ferments there’s going to be a lot of gunk on the bottom. And we don’t really want to suck that up when i transfer from the fermentation keg to the serving keg a little later on so shortened it tube does a great job for that.

For this, we’re looking around 31 ibu of bitterness. I really like czech saaz hops for this i think just that sort of little bit of spiciness you get in the herbal notes are going to be perfect for this beer.

So i’m using czech saaz for everything uh, the bittering hop addition, this is 1.5 ounces for a five gallon batch that goes in at the start of the boil, which is now, then i’ll be adding the remaining 1.5 ounces at 15 minutes 

Okay I have the beer in the sanitized corny keg and now i’m gonna add in my yeast.

So for this one, a saison style use is probably the best option for a gazette and i’m using belgium saison II and this likes to be fermented around 70 to 84 fahrenheit or 21 to 29 celsius.

i’m going to go on the low end of that around 70 fahrenheit. Now let’s take this to the fermentation chamber. It’s expecting to use a temperature controller to maintain fermentation temperatures in this fridge which is normally what i have to do with all of my chest freezes but this guy just lets me set the temperature to whatever i want at the front and then maintains the temperature.

For me, so basically built-in temperature controller i’ve set it to 70 fahrenheit. The keg is in the keezer now and i’ve just used the second hole that’s on the back of this thing to thread some tubing through and i’ve hooked that up to the gas post of my keg. 

So this way the co2 will escape and it will come out back of the keezer and then into a of bottle star san water and there’s plenty of room for it but this way i can keep this thing closed and still monitor fermentation.

And also the co2 will not get stuck in the fridge which can be a bit smelly, so all i’ve got to do now is wait a few weeks…

The kegerator worked great as a fermentation chamber!

I disconnected my gas post to not suck up any star san and then set the temperature to 38 fahrenheit for a cold crash with the beer cold i transferred into a clean keg, bumped up the psi to force carbonate and then a few days later the beer was ready to serve and ready for tasting.

Okay, so poured the beer out of the kegerator finally using for its intended purpose. Well, you did the pouring. Did it work out all right i kind of liked it?

I like the pull of the handle that it uh kind of retracts back up yeah yeah it’s been really good i mean i have had this running down here in the basement for about six weeks now. Never hear it running it’s completely silent um very impressed.

Okay, so for the tasting of this beer we’re going to do things a little bit differently. we have this kit here this sip and savor which is actually a sort of a beer tasting game or sort of an alcoholic beverage tasting game i guess and you can use it as a way to get some descriptors for the stuff that you’re trying.

So for today we’re going to do that and we’re going to not use any of our own words but we’ll use the cards to prompt us what we think this beer is.

All right, so we’ve got three sets of cards we’ve got um appearance uh i think i think because they’re upside down um this was smell slash taste yeah and then just taste it okay. so let’s do visual first. let’s just use the cards to describe what we think this beer looks like.

This is easy, all right what’s yours all right how about you take mine and see if you agree with it okay. So did cloudy often due to sediment kicked up from the bottom of the bottle this looks just as it sounds it has cottony puffs of particulate that move and flow within the lip liquid. Yeah, see that it’s a wheat beer so expected right yeah a little bit of particulate in there puffy clouds i prefer.

Let’s see what you said uh patillant sure which is the beverages slightly sparkling with carbonation enough to add some visual pizzazz to the glass. 

Yeah, not massively carbonated and then hazy murkiness so fine it cannot be identified as particular.

I think hazy is a better description than cloudy. okay you kind of win that round all right let’s take a sniff and uh maybe a little sip too okay, okay. 

hmm i’m gonna go first this time so light airy delica refreshing easy sipper absolutely caramel sticky sweet and with some hints of butterscotch absolutely not you don’t think so i do not agree with that assessment all right so you’ve got cereal a brew that invokes mental images of cereal grains, particularly those we associate with foodie flavors like oats corn and bran.

I can see that, yeah, i struggle a bit with with that but yeah it does have a sort of a grainy taste to it because there is such a lack of hops that you are able to get more of the mark built so i think in my unbiased opinion here.

That was pretty good, light was very good but you’ve kind of lost a point for saying caramel so now we’re tied at one each okay so this will decide things um this is just the taste is it uh yeah this was taste.

Taste i’m gonna make some more so you have chalky, noticeable chalky note akin to fresh gravel it talks about the sort of the white grape blends and that sort of white whininess. Yeah, like savvy on black okay. 

Yeah so the touch of that maybe similar to minerally yeah okay yeah okay so you’ve got satiny this textural sensation is similar to silkiness but has a bit of grain to the mouth feel brew is smooth not rough at all.

That’s a really good one i would say it’s good smooth uh yeah glossy stuff possibly even creamy not creamy but but it is smooth i i i always feel like wheat beers do have that sort of soft mouth feel to them i like.

I like their descriptions when they have it like the gravelly one this one says one might think of the texture of gravel versus carpet versus fresh vinyl. It’s very well thought out, like to make you think so we saying this is carpet no i would say this is more fresh vinyl fresh vital because it’s wonderful and then silky a textural sensation of the brew sliding over the tongue like fine silk dress over.

This is the one that is a wheat beer silky, yes, silky this is got a silky male film silky and satiny uh regretfully i think i’m gonna have to give you the uh the round there and the game.

Congratulations, awesome, thank you i feel like this is going to help us you know other than it’s malty it’s a bit sweet what you saying our vocabulary isn’t very good. I’m saying we can improve upon it right now things are going to be petiliant.

Wel’l link four sit and savor is in the description as is the link to this awesome kegerator. I mean, yeah, i was sent this to review, but it has been fantastic. 

That being said, as much as i’ve enjoyed pouring this Grisette out of that kegerator, i can’t wait to get seltzer water back on that thing. i love yeah when we do seltzer water or club soda, fizzy water, okay fizzy water sounds good.