Once I switched to all grain brewing and started to make decent beer, then invested in kegs for storing it, the next logical step was a bar to dispense it. Fleur was fine with having a bar in the backyard, as long as it had a "retro" feel. Given my dodgy carpentry skills, the selected style to meet the requirements was variously referred to as "faux native", "tiki", or "dodgy Balinese". It took nearly two years to get the bar to the point where beer was being poured, and there is still a bit more work to do, but now that large amounts of beer are available on tap, work rates seem to have slowed significantly.

Here is the retro, Balinese feel, bar. It is built under and around a big Japanese Pepper tree that prevented the lawn growing, and I have crazy paved the area leading to it to keep with the retro theme. The "cellar" behind the bar and the roof are clad in bamboo which I removed from a Water Authority drain in the interests of reducing noxious weeds in our suburb. It took a very long time to nail and wire the bamboo in place.

The view of the bar from the house as I wander out the back door several times a night to my local for a pint.

There is actually a colourbond steel flat roof under the bamboo to keep the rain out. But to hide the steel I have lined the entire ceiling with another 4 ute loads of bamboo. There is a "no smoking" policy in the bar as the bamboo has dried out by this point.

The floor of the bar is made from Jarrah floorboards rescued from a house being demolished up the road. That was the second house they had been in, so by the time I got them they were in pretty short lengths and the tongues were damaged, but they went down OK in the end. The bar and stools were found in a shed in Katanning and keep with the retro feel. Fleur has plenty of anodised aluminium ware for use in the bar as well with multiple apple ice buckets on call..

The 5 tap font. More floorboards, sanded and oiled this time, and framed with bamboo. The masks are inlaid with Mother of Pearl and were carved for me by a guy in Mataram on Lombok on one of my trips to a minesite. The drip tray is a varnished split piece of bamboo, lashed into place (I knew my boy scout history would come in handy one day). There is a copper drain pipe hidden in one of the pieces of bamboo. The right hand tap always has soda water and I use a bit to keep the drip tray clean as I am worried about fruit flies building up.

If you want to know how the dispensing works, you need to head to the "cellar" behind this bamboo door.

There are 2 fridges. The dispensing fridge holds 6 kegs. The wooden shelf has extra support and also has gaps to allow air circulation. The door has been "modified" with a stanley knife to fit the kegs in.

The fridge is about a foot off the ground on blocks and sits at an odd angle. The aim is to minimise the length of warm beerline outside of the fridge going to the taps.

Here is the back of the taps. In Summer, I expect that when cold beer hits hot taps, the beer will froth at the first pour. While I was building the font I added a cooling device. Each of the stainless steel shanks leading to the taps has a small diameter copper pipe wound around it. The PVC pipe is the high pressure water manifold, and water squeezes from there through each copper coil and into the black retic pipe for return to the pump. I suspect this might not work. I might not have good enough thermal contact between the copper and the threaded stainless steel. So I havent made the bucket to sit on the compressor hump in the fridge or bought the bilge pump,to go in the bucket and I haven't drilled extra holes in the fridge.

Here was a test. I heated the back of two shanks with a hairdryer. I disconnected the coil on one tap, and ran tap water at 17 degrees through the other. I had a thermocouple measuring the temperature at the spout of each tap. Initially, when there is a big difference between the beer tap and water temperature there is a clear difference in cooling. But later on the taps cool at the same rate. It should work better with water from a bucket in the fridge at 4 degrees, but I am not that confident and am rethinking/pondering this concept. Maybe some heatsink paste on the tap shanks, and insulation tight around the coil?

Kegged beer needs a source of CO2. In this case a converted fire extinguisher with a valve instead of a trigger. The gas line is valved and split, and has a non return valve to prevent beer getting to the regulator.

One side of the gas line goes to a keg disconnect for gassing outside the fridge, and to a car tyre valve fitting for gassing up plastic bottles and mountain bike tyres. There is also a keg pressure gauge (a disconnect fitted to a cheap pressure gauge) to find out exactly what pressure a keg is sitting at, as I struggle to master the art of achieving the perfect level of carbonation.

The gas line into the fridge goes to a home made manifold, to select which keg is gassed at any time. The soda water keg is gassed at 300 kPa and so is always valved off from the beer kegs. The rags will be replaced by expanding foam as soon as I am confident I have all the lines set up correctly.

The second fridge in the "cellar" is for fermenting and lagering. Again the shelf is slotted for air circulation and supported. I have a thermocouple on the fermenter so I can monitor the temperature without opening the door. The overide temperature controller turning the fridge on and off has a probe strapped and insulated to the fermenter.

Hope you enjoyed the virtual tour of my bar!