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DraughtKeg Disassembly

The Story

My family has four refrigerators.  One obviously in the kitchen, one I bought for my computer shop, one in my wife’s classroom, and one tiny fridge I picked up for $25 to put my lunch in at work.  I had this tiny refrigerator in my office for a couple of years and decided to take my shop fridge to work because it’s bigger.  Now I have this small and nearly useless fridge in my house with few ideas about what to do with it.

The DraughtKeg is a proprietary 5-liter package of beer that appears to be from Heineken and is pressurized with an internal CO2 cartridge.  It comes with a few plastic pieces used to serve beer directly from the keg, but it is also compatible with the Krupps BeerTender appliance.  There are several other brands of beer available in DraughtKegs, but I’ve only seen Heineken, Heineken Light, and Newcastle Brown Ale with my own eyes.  I’ve noticed the DraughtKeg in stores for a while now, but since my mind has been on kegging homebrew lately I wondered if the keg itself could be reused for kegging homebrew.  It turns out that it’s not, but if you ever wondered what’s inside one of these you don’t have to spend your own $20 on one to find out.

The Disassembly

I purchased this DraughtKeg at my local Publix supermarket and spent a couple of days emptying it.  Five liters is 14.09 twelve-ounce servings; I think it took four days or so.  When it finally tapped out, I grabbed the camera and some tools.  The only thing stopping a project to reuse the keg is the internal CO2 cartridge.  It can’t be removed through the 1″ hole in the top.  It is also glued to the bottom, which would make sanitizing the keg quite tedious if not impossible.  The slideshow below will walk you through disassembly:

Conclusion

While the DraughtKeg is convenient, it’s not eco-friendly.  It’s made of recyclable steel – which is perfectly fine – but it would be nice if it were refillable.  I’m not asking them to change it, but I’m not encouraged to buy another one.  My next bit of research for this little endeavor involves a 2.5-Gallon Cornelius Keg, but that may be too big for my tiny fridge.  We’ll see.

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