Building Aeronaut: Our mobile beer dispenser

As many new breweries are wont to do, we at Aeronaut have taken a page from the homebrewing world and incorporated it into our brewery. I’m talking about a movable draft fridge that had its beginnings as a sort of kegerator (or ‘keezer’ as they are sometimes called).

Back when we were prototyping around 12 recipes per month, we started to need lots of space for storage and dispense of those homebrews. This led to us building a cool fridge that would double as a bar. It was a modest amount of woodworking ,  but it came out really nice.

Frame for the beer fridge
Frame for the beer fridge

We started out with four taps, but that quickly increased to eight. The interior needed lots of organization, since we had eight draft lines, a CO2 tank and up to 12 gas lines installed.  The beer was flowing smoothly and it was excellent to have this all figured out.

Taps installed and flowing!
Taps installed and flowing!
The inner workings
The inner workings

Of course, maintaining 8 tap lines is no simple task, and aside from keeping the keg inventory moving, we needed to have a system in place for keeping the lines clean. That led to our home-grown line cleaning system! We used a nice centrifugal pump and split it up over the draft lines so that we could flush and clean four lines at a time (see our instructional post on draft line cleaning for more info).

Now that we are building out our tasting room, we are going to have a more permanent beer faucet setup. But what is to come of our loyal draft fridge? We are keeping it in the brewery and will take advantage of its size and mobility so that we can dispense beers for growler fills away from the main tasting bar. Also, as the Aeronaut Foods Hub fills out, we will often find reasons to tote the fridge 100 feet to the other side of the space so beer can flow right in the market.

Bringing the beer to the people!
Bringing the beer to the people!

The only thing missing now is a name for our good old draft fridge. We’re open to suggestions!