The old faithful wine beer fridge finally gave up the ghost a couple weeks ago. It had been reliably chugging along for years, but recently had trouble keeping the temperature down, and was running most of the time. I did some searching online to try to find a good replacement. I initially thought that a kegerator without the taps would be the best option, since they are large, don’t have weird bumps in them that eat into bottle storage, and keep very cold efficiently. But they’re also much more expensive than either wine fridges, or a new category I hadn’t seen before: beverage refrigerators. The beverage fridges seemed like a good option, since they’re designed for soda/beer (i.e., colder than wine). But I couldn’t find any good info on how big they were inside, and estimating their capacity based on the number of soda cans made it look like they wouldn’t hold that many bottles (20-30 as opposed to the 35 the old wine fridge held).
But then we found a reasonably priced chest freezer. Even after buying an external temperature controller (which cuts the power to keep the freezer from getting too cold), it was less expensive than the beverage fridges. And after I built a little shelf to hold a crate of bottles in a second layer, it can hold quite a bit more than the wine fridge (about 50 bottles).
The other advantage of having a chest freezer is potentially being able to lager or cold crash beers after fermenting (or being able to do a controlled-temperature fermentation if we wanted to). And if our trusty kegerator stops working, we could always drill a few holes and make the chest freezer into a keezer.
