I’m looking to serve 6-8 beers on tap, bottles and a few choice wines at my new place. I do not have room for a walk in cooler so I’m trying to figure how I can make this all fit. I plan to use the 1/6 slim kegs since all my taps will be craft beer. The usuals will be in bottles. The kegarators always list keg capacity only. Anyone have any experience with a 6-8 head tap in a fairly small space? Will one of those 94 inch bev-airs do the trick?
1/6th barrels are not a bad way to go if you want to add additional selections, but understand that you will pay a bit of a premium for the 1/6 vs the more standard 1/2 barrel. Also, some beers are not available in the 1/6 size. In any case, yes doing the smaller kegs in a free standing cooler will work.
Have you thought about your back stock? If your 96" cooler is full with tapped kegs and bottles and you don’t have a walk in cooler, you may find yourself in a bind on a busy Fri night when one keg blows and you only have room temp back stock. At that point you’re out for the night because it’ll take awhile to get that keg down to temp.
My 2 cents
Eric
Yeh I’m in a tough spot Eric. Tap is hot hot hot right now and with all the small breweries popping up I don’t think the trend is going away. I was hoping I could store 6 barrels and two back ups in the 96 incher and 4 more backups in another fridge. These distributors only talk to you if you have a check in one hand and a pen in the other ( not all) so it’s hard to get any answers. I wasn’t aware some beers werent available in the 1/6. I don’t understand why we don’t have many 1/4 barrels in the U.S. They hold 62 pints and slim enough to save space.
We feature local micro brews as well. We’ve had good luck developing partnerships with them and they will fill 1/6, 1/4, or 1/2 barrels…Really whatever we want. They self distribute in many cases and want to get their product out in the marketplace so they don’t have quite the pompous attitude that some of the larger players may have when dealing with an independent restaurant.
We like to support other local businesses as much as possible anyway which does have its advantages too.
I think if you have a small separate refrigerator for some back stock, you’ll be fine. Good luck!
Thanks very much
We got a merchandiser cooler for $200 at an auction, and our main distributor installed taps on the side of the cooler that customers see. We stock soda, cans of beer, and 1/6 barrels in there. We can fit 5 1/6 barrels in there, and too many different cans. We store the gas outside of the fridge in the back of the house. Hope this helps! These were the only pics I had handy.
Throw back dew… glad i don’t work there. There would never be any stock 
That looks cool nice setup!
It’s not perfect, but the price was right, and it holds a lot of product for it’s footprint. That’s for sure.
I’ve always used True Draft boxes that have worked well. Each has 6 taps. Room enough for (2) 1/2 bbls and (4) 1/6 bbls. You can save a lot of money using half barrels.
I’m adding a 12-tap glycol system for a total of 24 taps. Only craft beer on tap. People love it and not many restaurants/bars cater to that crowd.
Draft boxes? Is this another name for kegerator? What size do you have? The 95 inch from bev air can hold 5 full kegs so I was going to go with that one
http://truemfg.com/catalog.aspx?language_id=1&event_id=401&categoryId=570&productName=TDD-3
^ I have two of these. My beer rep helped me convert the boxes from 2-taps to 6-taps. When it was all said and done, I believe each box cost me around $3,000.
Keep in mind you’ll have to clean these lines every few weeks. I pay someone to do it professionally, which I highly recommend. It’s about $5 per line, per cleaning.
I went to Iowa by the way. Lived in Iowa City for 5 years. Go Hawks!