My Kegerator

All guys have wishlists.  Some pine for a 400hp rear wheel drive sports car.  Some lust over 80inch home theater setups.  Maybe you or your guy wants that 20megapixel DSLR or a sweet cordless drill.  Some more attainable than others given where you are in your life and what you will actually be able to enjoy.  Ever since my then 21 year old buddy Ken bought me and my then under 21 friends our first couple of kegs for a college party I wanted a kegerator.  I wanted to have draft beer in my own home and not just out at the bar.

Two years ago I somewhat impulsively surfed onto my local Maryland Craigslist and found a very nice kegerator for $300.  Hours later my buddy Matty helped me retrieve it and load it into my hatchback for the trip to it's new home.  At this time in my life my apartment was somewhat of the spot to be.  My roomie Scott and I would frequently host Jersey Shore parties, pregames, and full blown ragers.  We were a couple years outta college and still routinely regressed to our Penn State partying ways (still do but it is less often).  A kegerator made fiscal sense.  Plus it's just cool.  Typically loaded with a $60 keg of Natural, Keystone, or $90 Yuengling when we were feeling frisky we didn't feel so bad about shelling out to host since we had the power of the kegerator, pouring beers for our friends for pennies. 

 Here's the old girl  

In the past two years we have been hosting less and it takes much longer for a keg to runneth dry.  Light lagers are no longer on the shopping list and Yuengling rarely makes the cut these days (why does Yuengling make you so hungover anyway?  Huh, Dick?!).  We've upgraded to Blue Moon, Harpoon, Dogfish, and Dominion but we still procure the big bad 1/2 kegs and while draft beer will probably never lose its luster on me I do get antsy for more frequent rotation as it seems to take about 3 months to go through a keg.  So now, 1/6 kegs will be my target so I can get more variety while still having that unbeatable value and taste from a keg.  One day I will dive into the world of home kegging but probably not until my square footage goes up a bit (damn you dc-metro prices).  

There isn't a huge point to this post other than to kind of show how my kegerator is growing along with me as I get older.   

Next on draft you ask?  Southampton Double White.  A 1/6 keg of course.  I'll let ya know how it turns out.  

Cheers!

Have Faithful

Ed and I ducked out of work early once the newest dogfish beer started turning up on their fish finder tool.  Ed is a huge pearl jam fan, so the Faithful tribute beer to them made it a must find ASAP.  We normally find ourselves spending countless hours cold calling beer stores, often with no luck on these things.  To our chagrin, this place called "Tenley Town Mini Mart" had 4 of them last after getting a shipment on the Monday earlier in the week.  It was just 2 metro stops south of Bethesda.  I would not have pegged this place as a craft beer store, which is wasn't as the advertise 3 - 30 packs of Keystone for $30 sign told us (good deal regardless), but nestled between the a dogfish Chateau Jiahu and a Goose Island Matilda 4-pack, were 4 bottles for us, 2 a piece.  We snatched them up and excitedly made our way home.  Our girlfriends were probably more excited, so they could be spared of the giddy and nerve wrecked fury that is us wanting to find a beer.

The beer was pretty great considering how clear and crisp it was.  The fruit was un-worldly.  It was a belgian golden ale that was continuously fruited every 6 minutes with currants.  It comes in at 7%, which isn't high on the scale for abv for dogfish's big bottles, but considering the lightness of the beer, it was well handled.  I still can't get over how clear the beer was.  Our homebrews, even non-stouts and porters, manage to be pretty opaque to say the least.  We also had the trappist chocolate we made last month, which tasted pretty good to our nervousness.   To top off the night, we had a Jolly Roger Imperial Stout from Ottos in State College to celebrate International Stout Day.

The Imperial Stout is in the glass below.  We're excited to make both one of those and a barley wine one day, but we're to transient at the moment to know we'll be in a place for a year in order to age it before drinking.  One day we'll have garages.



Ed's best sexy pose.



Lexi enjoying some Faithful.



Ed shows off his loot in the metro.