The Humble Beginnings of Shannon’s Poverty Bar (better name possibly forthcoming)

I love that giddy, empty feeling that I feel when I’ve been on a juice fast for two weeks, or when I am up on a rock face and I feel something slither onto the last two fingers connected to the rock. When I’m on a knife edge ridge and I can hear the scream of the wind coming up from two thousand sheer feet down. This feeling is also common to those who have a penchant for making possibly unadvised purchases, utilizing the dregs of their bank account, of items that they haven’t seen. I feel that this is probably one of those internet-related phenomena, like the dissolution of society and the downfall of the British pub (which are basically the same thing).

This feeling rose in me at about 5 pm last Tuesday, while I was at work, trolling Craigslist for homebrewing equipment. My difficulties in finding an empty 15.5 gallon keg shell for conversion into a brewing kettle have been well documented, of course, and the frustrations that this fruitless quest gave me were only augmented by the fact that use of the keywords “keg” “beer” “homebrew” and any number of related terms give results of about 70% kegerators. None of the kegerators come with full-sized keg shells, and they’re all giant, smelly, crappy old refrigerators that somebody took from their mom’s house and drilled a hole through.

Well, well. Well! Imagine my surprise when I find a brand new, beautiful, black, bar quality and four foot tall kegerator complete with full CO2 tank, regulator, valves and tubes, and a tower with two taps. And a keg shell. Up until this moment, I was going to use what I had in an effort to eat more than ramen noodles for the next two months. That is, I was going to do my primary fermentations in my glass carboys and then bottle condition. Bottles can always be found in a college town, I figured. Even if it’s a small college, in a small town. Then I had a vision.

I was standing outside my house, at my outdoor bar, complete with Thai monkey head on a stick sculpture. I had four different homebrews in Cornelius-style five gallon kegs on tap in the kegerator, and nubile young men were feeding me beer and little pieces of cheese on sticks and bread with olives in it. My brewing sculpture was in the corner, gleaming in silver and black. It hummed and smiled at me, and I realized that to make this dream come true, I had to buy this kegerator and convert it into this draft system.

Three hours and some Benjamins later I brought it into my house, and now it sits in my living room, glimmering and grinning, and waiting to make my dreams come true. I am now recruiting both nubile young men and different hard and soft cheeses, and after E-Days, I will be holding personal interviews with both. Simultaneously. I’ll take care of the beer.