Keg on Wheels

Bottling is OK when we want to take a few beers somewhere, but we needed a more drastic solution for taking a lot of beer to a party. After poking around on the inter-toobes, we found this solution:

First we modified a 60 qt. cooler by removing the lid and making a new lid out of insulation board. The old lid popped right off and will go back on if we want to use cooler normally.

We bought a shorty party tap as the one I have is several feet long and would have ended up on the ground getting dirty or stepped on.

Finally we bought a portable keg charger. This is a small device that uses food-grade CO2 cartridges to push the beer out of the keg. This allows us to leave our big heavy CO2 tank at home.

The whole system worked great. The beer was cold all night and we only used up one CO2 cartridge serving an entire keg. The cooler and new lid worked better than expected maintaining temperature - we left the rig in the back of the truck overnight and there was only about a cup of melted ice this morning. Nice!