Last month marked the grand opening of our new corner pub. I’m not just saying its a corner pub; it is actually located in a closet in the corner of our finished basement. My kegerator needed a better home so I emptied one of our closets and lined the concrete slab with faux brick panelling from Lowe’s. I had to paint an intrusive aluminum duct black to make it fit in better.

I then adorned the pub with beer related paraphenalia I got off of Ebay. I got a swag lamp from Old Style beer and a bunch of vintage beer ads for the walls–mostly from the 1940s and 1950s. I also got an old Lowenbrau menu board so I could show what was on tap.  I found a custom sign guy on eBay who did the sign on the front of the door for me and a custom tap guy who took a design I made in Photoshop and made it into a tap for me.

Other people contributed to the pub as well: Karen provided the “Fine Beer always served here” sign and Paulette provided the pitcher with the Ben Franklin phrase: Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Not to mention my parents who made the kegerator a reality without which this pub would be . . . well, lets face it . . . silly.

I then thought it would be cool to have a bunch of steins and I got about a dozen different ones from Ebay.

I soon realized that having a kegerator would make homebrewing much easier because I would not have to sanitize, prime, and fill 48 bottles and then wait three weeks for them to carbonate. Instead, I could go directly from fermentation to kegging the beer and it would be ready to drink about 24 hours after fermentation was complete. So my corner pub is actually a brewpub as I already have my first home brew on tap: Ruthie Brown Ale. Soon after kegging my first home brew, I realized it would be better to have two taps so that I could keep all the fittings for the home brew kegs on one tap and all the fittings for the commercial kegs on the other. Besides, my kegerator was big enough to accomodate up to four 1/6 barrel kegs. Why waste the space? Currently, I have Blue Moon Belgian White on one tap and the house brew Ruthie Brown Ale on the other.

For more photos of the Fife & Wife Pub, check out my Smugmug Gallery.

CHEERS!