Turn your old fridge into a kegerator that pours $1.50 beers

A former teacher has ditched the classroom for DIYs and his own business that was inspired by a frothy homemade birthday gift for his dad.

While looking for a birthday present for his avid homebrewing father, 25-year-old Billy Clay stumbled across the well-known kegerator — a fridge designed to store and dispense kegs of beer — but was put off by the high price point and instead thought he would try to make one himself.

“I was unemployed at the time so I didn’t really want to fork out $700 on it, so I decided to have a crack at making my own,” the Attadale man said.

“I’m not handy with tools at all. I can honestly say before I did this I had never used a drill, a hole saw or anything like that … but I found an old bar fridge and all of the parts and did a pretty good job of pulling it all together.

“It worked out to be considerably cheaper and my dad loved it.”

When his friends also found a lot of love for his creation, Mr Clay realised others might want to make their own kegerator-inspired bar fridge too.

“I was living in a share house and all of my mates absolutely loved it and it made me think that this kind of set up is usually what homebrew dads would usually have, but it’s not really something that the general party share house has been exposed to,” he said.

“So I thought ‘this is such a cool thing, why don’t we target something a little bit cheaper for someone that might be at uni or in a similar life space?’.

“That’s was where the idea of Brew 2 You and the Kegerator Kit was born.”

The Kegerator Kit comes with all the parts needed to upcycle an old bar fridge into a fully-functioning beer-dispensing kegerator. Mr Clay says the work can be done by anyone in just a few hours.

“It includes a fountain with the tap, the drip tray, a temperature regulator, a CO2 regulator and the keg itself — all you have to do is find a bar fridge, get a SodaStream, attach everything to the fridge and then fill up the keg and it will be good to go,” Mr Clay said.

“If you’re brewing it yourself, it’s going to be cheaper. There are places in Perth that will fill up your keg for $50, which for 20 litres works out to around $1.50 a pint, which is absurd when you think about it.

“Plus you’re not using glass bottles and cans or plastic all the time either.”

The Kegerator Kits go for $350 on the Brew 2 You website.