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Home Bars Supplied and Fitted

We supply and fit home bar equipment across the Fylde Coast. If you want one beer or half a dozen beers on your home bar we can help.

I’m generally reluctant to share images of people’s private spaces but there’s some amazing creativity out there. These jobs are usually the same setup, a two product cooler with whatever product font the customer specifies and new gauges throughout. Sometimes they are new fonts, other times we might have some really nice used ones and we can adjust the price according to what we fit.

Badges can be a little bit bonkers so those Moretti ones can cost £25 if they need to be bought separately! We can usually supply those from stock though at no extra charge.

The expensive item is the cooler. Our ‘go to’ is the new two product hydrocarbon unit for home bar installs. These are compact, so perfect in a home bar setting where space is normally at a premium, and amazingly efficient at getting down to temperature. The downside of these is the lead time, the manufacturer is currently giving us a lead time of 12 weeks which is an awful long time to wait. Our workaround for that is to install one of our rental units and switch it out when the new cooler arrives; again we never look to charge for that.

We always specify a two product cooler even when the customer is only looking for a single product setup for their home bar. There are a couple of very good reasons for this. Firstly, the single product unit only develops 2.2kg of ice whereas the two out produces 5kg. A 5kg ice bank is going to keep up with most home bar settings, 2.2kg might start to struggle with prolonged use or warm weather. It’s also future proofing; it’s very simple to add a second product to your home bar if the cooler has a second coil.

There’s no compromise right through our home bar setups. We always fit secondary regulators as well as primaries, we never fit used regulators, and we warranty everything for 12 months.

If the customer is trying to work to a price then we will try to work with them, if we have a good used cooler available for instance, but even when we fit a used cooler we put a 12 month warranty on it ourselves.

Price wise, we are looking at £1200 or so for a full home bar setup. There are cheaper options out there and if price is your only criteria then we are probably not the right supplier for you. If you want a local company that will do what they say they’re going to do and will stand behind their work then maybe that’s us.

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Home Bar Setups

So you want to put a bar in at home? Well, we’ve done loads of home bar setups so can help with that. There’s a short video here with the critical dimensions so that deals with the space issue. The key dimensions are width, depth (as in front to back) and height.

Depth wise we always think of 600mm as being about right. That’s enough to fit the cooler in with some breathing space around it and fit kegs in as well if that’s what you want. It’s convenient too if you want to use regular worktop as your bar top.

Width wise we would be thinking a bare minimum of one metre, which would accommodate the cooler and gas bottle, and one and a half metres if you want to fit a keg under there as well. We do build our own mobile units to a metre and they work just fine, we just have to put the keg separate from the bar is all.

This is our two product event bar and as can be seen from the pictures there’s enough room to fit the gas bottle, beer cooler, beer gas regulators and all the associated pipe work. With these ones we would leave the kegs outside and run cooling jackets off the recirculation pump in the cooler. We also run cold water through the python and up into the font from the same source; there’s plenty of cooling going on in this setup.

The headroom in this one is a metre, which gives us plenty of space for the gas bottle.

If you’re building a home bar then this is the exact same setup that we would use and / or recommend. You may want a single or double font rather than this triple but all of the dimensions and equipment are the same. These coolers have four cooling loops but we would only ever use two at any one time so a cooler with two loops wil be just fine for one or two products in your home bar setup; they’re just a touch smaller physically.

These bars are all driven by gas, there’s no need for any motors. We use 60/40 – 60% carbon dioxide (CO2) and 40% nitrogen – and find that 25psi usually does the trick. There’s lots of arguments about gas pressures and there is some very clever maths around length of pipe run and all that guff. At our level, all we need to do is understand what works and for us that’s 25psi of top pressure and no real issue going up or down by a few PSI to get the balance right.

We do use a secondary regulator per product in all our event bars and home bar setups, which some might see as a slight bit of overkill, but it does give complete control over each product and for what a secondary regulator costs it’s not really worth trying to save a few quid.

At the bottle, we need a primary regulator. If you’re tempted to use a welding regulator because you can’t see the difference or there’s one going cheap please, please, don’t. The gas in those bottles is stored at over 800psi and the beer kegs are not rated to 800psi. Regulators are not cheap, think £75 or so, but they are an absolutely critical component and not a place to try and save money.

It’s quite possible to dispense beer with CO2, we do it ourselves here in the brewshed and have seen plenty of home bar setups using CO2. Dispensing with CO2 is a great compromise if you’re a brewer and want to carbonate your beer as well. If you’re designing your home bar from scratch though mixed gas is the way to go.

We will do another post on the gas setup itself, in terms of where the pipes go etc., if you have any questions around any of this or any other aspect of your home bar setup do drop us a message; we’re always (usually!) happy to talk beer.