Hey, Rick Uzubell again from Cabaret Design Group,
talking today about Direct-Draw
Draft Beer System Design.
Hello everyone and welcome to another
edition of Design Buzz. I'm your host
Rick Uzubell. Today I want to talk about
direct draw draft beer system design for
bars, restaurants and nightclubs. If
you're considering such a system for your
establishment, there's a few things you need
to know to make a sound investment.
First, all draft beer systems rely on
refrigerators or walk-in coolers to
house the beer, as the temperature of the
product is of the utmost importance.
Ideally, draft beer should be delivered
between 36 to 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Even
a slight increase in temperature can
lead to excessive foaming and even
cloudy and sour beer. Because of the
short operating distances, direct-draw draw
systems are inherently efficient at
delivering consistent high quality beer.
What types of equipment are available
for these systems? First,
you have direct-draw coolers and
you have the emerging draft beer wall
systems. In terms of the coolers, this is
equipment that many people have
seen through the years and they come in
various configurations. It's just a short
cooler with beer towers on top. This one
here is about five feet long, and
a little deeper than normal. It's
designed really to handle half barrels,
so you would probably put the
popular U.S. domestics into something like
this, which would be Miller Lite,
Bud Light and Coors. Other comparable
models are available from two-to-six
faucets and
they range in price from $1,000 to $3,500.
If you want to get a little
craftier here, (no pun intended)
you could put together a cooler
like this, which is a Perlick DDS84,
which is a 7' cooler, and you could
add
your own tower to it and do it ala carte.
This is a Micro-Matic
Metro-T tower with eight faucets,
so therefore you could get eight brands of beer
out of here. Typically, they would be
slim quarter-barrels and slim sixth
barrels, which are the keg sizes typical of craft
beers. But, if you were trying to work
that into your into your picture,
I'm going to demonstrate this by live
example, to a bar that we
currently have on the board.
This one here is
designed to process alcohol-based drinks
and typical of that (I'll get you back to
better example) we would
have
all the underbar stainless on the front bar
and and because virtually every square
inch of this front bar is
dedicated towards towards equipment
that's used to process
alcohol-based drinks,
there's really no place for that type of
cooler on the front bar. If you were to
turn around and put it behind you,
what you would typically have back here
are tiered bottle displays for
your call and premium liquor, that would
make it virtually impossible for you to
reach these bottles efficiently without
having to constantly reach around them
and knocking them over. So, in terms of
how you would incorporate that type of
cooler in your in your system,
-- in your establishment -- I have
another idea, and this could be a good one,
you could put it (because they're
available casters) you take the same seven
foot Perlick unit put out here inside
the restaurant wherever you have
a busy day, and then you could have a
additional bartender out here, and/or
even put something like this out on a
terrace arrangement.
This is a nice approach for relieving
pressure off of your normal bartenders on a
busy night.