Every home bar needs a kegerator. There are many approaches to obtaining a kegerator, but making it your own requires some imagination and a willingness to apply yourself to the modification of the inner workings of your home draft system. Designing a unique and functional draft beer tower modification can be as simple as gluing fabric or fur to the draft tower, or as complicated as creating a LED light-up Plexiglas tube. When my home brewing friends and speakeasy acquaintances ask me what they can to do spice up their home bar, my first answer usually has to do with modifying the draft tower on their home draft system. I tell them what I will tell you – the only limit is your imagination.
There are many out of the box options for replacing your draft tower. Some companies offer kits that can add taps to the tower you already have, and others offer a stylish chrome plated alternative to the thicker tower that is stock on most kegerators. There are also the towers that allow for multiple taps: Single column double, triple, or even quadruple faucets are available, “T” Style, Mushroom style, Column, Elbow, and even Ceramic Draft towers are available commercially.
These draft towers can be good starting points, especially if you are interested in having multiple types of beers available at the same time. Many of these designs can stand alone to make your draft beer set-up unique while maintaining function, especially if you do not have a well developed theme for your home bar.
If your home bar does have a well-developed theme, you will need to go one step further with your draft tower to ensure that it stands out. Having a rotating seasonal theme on your home bar adds some added interest. This is where experience with set design and things like Halloween decorations can come in handy. What follows are a few examples of some of my favorite unique draft beer tower modifications.
The Orcish Mead Hall
One great home bar theme that is very unique is the Orcish Mead Hall. This room was outfitted with a large variety of weapons on the wall – swords, clubs, axes, and shields. There were grisly battle standards adorned with fake severed limbs and the tables and stools were made of rough-hewn wood and stumps. Naturally, a stainless steel draft tower did not fit in with the theme of the bar. It was a simple modification to make it fit in, however.
The first thing was to make a bar top that obscured view of the kegerator’s main body. The top from an old dining room table was cut down and a U shaped notch hole was cut and fitted over the kegerator. The draft tower was removed and disassembled. A large Styrofoam rock, or “Fake Boulder” was carved to allow the draft tower to fit into it, giving the impression of a natural spring spewing beer, mead, etc. The tap handle was removed and a cow bone was fitted with the properly threaded bolt to be mounted onto the tap as the new handle. The end result was very Orcish indeed.
The Boxing Ring
The Boxing Ring is a speakeasy that had a lot of old boxing memorabilia lining the walls. The tables had reproductions of old boxing posters from the 1800s through 1950s, stories of various boxers, all laminated with resin to make a smooth and easy to clean table top. The person who built the bar was a real fan of using that plastic resin to encapsulate different objects for artistic purposes. So what did she do? She made a resin cast block with gold painted beer lines and golden painted boxing gloves encased inside. The block looked for all the world like a huge block of ice with boxing gloves and beer lines frozen into place. The area immediately surrounding the end of the block was molded hollow with enough room to attach the beer faucet, which was screwed into the epoxy resin.
The Workshop
The Workshop was a home bar that was built into a wood and metal working shop. It was utilitarian and had a unique function as well – the kegerator, when beer wasn’t being dispensed, looked for all the world like a rolling tool chest with other tool boxes stacked on top. It wasn’t until the top tool box was opened that the beer faucet was revealed! Perfect for keeping visiting clients and newbies in the dark about the consumption and location of alcoholic beverages in the work site.
The Rolling Crypt
The Rolling Crypt was a parade float that was pulled by a bicycle and resembled a crypt. This was no ordinary parade float, however. The rolling Crypt had four soda kegs hidden inside it, and a variety of black and green tentacles dangling from the rear crypt door. Inside one of these tentacles was a beer spigot dispensing the Dead Horse Ale from within. While this was not technically a draft beer tower modification, the same principles of construction could certainly be applied to a draft beer tower, especially if your home bar has a gothic motif. A tombstone draft beer tower would be fairly easy to present – just make sure to stock up on Halloween decorations in the fall. Also, stone fountain statues may be easily converted into beer fountains – or at least dispensers.
LED Plexiglass Draft Tower
This project works well in a technological or futuristic environment. The LED draft tower acts as a kind of new wave lava lamp, and can be programmed to strobe, gently cycle through different colors, or maintain one color. Your local electronics shop can help you with the circuitry, and the Plexiglass and all the tools needed to build the basis of this draft tower can be had at TAP Plastics or a similar retail plastics outlet.
I hope this article has given you all the ideas you need to come up with your own unique draft beer tower modifications. Remember, there is no shame in using hot glue!
