We’ve recently touched upon the Hopsy SUB Home Tap and how it can provide fresh, draft beer at home. There is an even bigger, more exciting alternative for home bar lovers – the Philips Perfect Draft. This home bar system only accepts its own 6-litre mini kegs, but there is a huge range of lagers, wheat beers, IPAs and a growing craft ale range too. This beer machine is designed to chill your beer down to a refreshing three degrees. Better still, the unit can keep your mini kegs fresh and carbonated for up to 30 days from the day of tapping.
The Perfect Draft is often installed in ‘man caves’ designed to be havens for sport lovers and a chance to unwind without having to trek down to your local bar or public house. The reason so many of us head to the pub to watch live sport is because it’s increasingly accessible here, but it’s possible to turn your man cave or home bar into a sports bar without forking out for Sky Sports or BT subscriptions. A growing number of online sportsbooks live stream sports for their customers. Unibet TV is a free service to all their customers, spanning soccer, horse racing, motorsport and tennis. You could hook these live streams up from your laptop to a home bar TV in no time at all, providing you have an internet connection.
Where the Perfect Draft excels over the SUB Home Tap is its bigger kegs. They hold approximately 10.5 pints in a keg – two-and-a-half times the amount of a SUB Torp. This means you will spend less time swapping beers in and out of the machine, particularly if the machine is only used regularly by one household. To keep a close eye on how fast your Perfect Draft kegs are going down, the machine has an accurate LCD display to alert you when the keg is reaching the bottom of its barrel.
It’s an incredibly hygienic way to enjoy draft beer at home too. With each keg, you replace the tube which delivers the beer from the keg through your real tap handle to the glass. This ensures premium, pub-quality beer with every pull. The machine operates at just 70 W of electricity too, which makes it as energy efficient as a modest home fridge.
In terms of the nitty-gritty of the beer selection, there are currently over 35 Perfect Draft kegs to choose from. There is a huge choice of Belgian and German beers and crisp lagers, as well as British craft brewers like Tiny Rebel and Thornbridge. American brewers, Goose Island have also got in on the action too. Unfortunately, the Perfect Draft machine does not appear to be available to US-based consumers at present but given the growing popularity of home beer systems it’s surely a case of ‘watch this space’.
Image courtesy: Photo, CC BY-SA 4.0, Beermachine