Behold My Drinks Fridge
Posted on August 29, 2019 Posted by John Scalzi 131 Comments
I’m a simple man, and so I can say one of the things that made me feel like a real fancy pants person — someone who had really made it in the world — was the day we got a new refrigerator and instead of throwing out the old one entirely, we moved it to the garage, where it took on a new and even more celebrated life as our drinks fridge. Look, when you get to a point in your life where you have a whole fridge just for drinks, you’re kind of top of the heap. Call me provincial, but I still wholly smug about it.
Today I was out and about, and we were running low on soda, so I went ahead and stocked up. Krissy and I don’t generally drink sugared sodas at this point, so most of the soda here is diet. We have both Coke Zero and Diet Coke (regular and caffeine-free versions), and I also have the Vanilla and Orange Vanilla versions of Coke Zero just to mix things up. We also have diet Barq’s, Sprite Zero, Cherry 7-UP, Diet Cherry Dr Pepper and Caffeine-Free Diet Dr Pepper, Diet Orange Crush and Diet Ginger Ale with Lemonade, plus various other drinkables, including Krissy’s beer and mixers (there’s usually a 12-pack of Michelob Ultra down there on the bottom shelf as well).
Yes, we drink a lot of soda. Don’t worry, we have water from the tap (which we then filter, because we have well water). It’s in the other fridge, along with milk and various fruit juices. We do drink other things, is what I’m saying. Try not to worry too much about our kidneys.
Do you have a drinks fridge? Do you feel smug about it if you do? Do you want one if you don’t? I’m genuinely curious.
Drinks fridge? Not for me. Full-size Coke Freestyle? Yes, please.
Yes, I do, but I never thought it was any big deal. I just like a variety of beverages cold at all times. Never felt smug about it. OTOH I don’t have a freezer. I guess I’m just a Costco failure.
We have a fridge in the garage. It’s where we keep the 8 1/2 gallons of milk we buy at a time and the produce.Couldn’t last without it- 4 kids plus drinking milk every day is a lot of shopping.
Years and years ago Ed saw an ad in some magazine that showed a refrigerator entirely filled with cheese and gasped audibly and said “this. THIS is what I want for Christmas.”
And yet no. We don’t have either a drinks fridge OR a cheese fridge.
We have a hi-sense vending machine in the den. Yes. A coin free vending machine. That way we can keep our drinks colder than the normal fridge (keep our sodas at 34 our food fridge at 37) and don’t have to open the fridge door to get a can of something.
We aren’t quite that fancy. Our store brand sodas go wherever we happen to find space.
Well, does a wine fridge count?
Maybe it’s a midwestern thing but having a basement or garage fridge is definitely filed under Living The Life. I always thought it was a tragedy that in my peak beer drinking days in my 20s when I could have most used a drinks fridge, I didn’t have the money to buy one or the square footage to put one.
Not me. I live in a condo, and my garage is one space in a detached building, plus we’ve got too much random junk, bicycles, etc. in it, and even when I lived in a house back east, when we’ve replaced refrigerators it’s because they died.
There’s room to put a dorm fridge under my desk, I guess, but I’m not much of a soda drinker, and my wife’s couple of diet cokes a day don’t really justify the space. (The coffee pot’s downstairs in the kitchen, and if I had one up here I’d get even less exercise and even more caffeine.)
We do have a drink fridge, but it is smaller. It’s more like a dorm room-sized fridge. We keep some soda pop in it for guests as we don’t drink soda too often. Some seltzer water (alcoholic and non-alcoholic), wine and some beer as well. The wine and beer don’t last as long as the soda for some reason.
Dorm fridge in our shared basement office, used for beer and for bulky leftovers like pots of stew or soup or chili. Useful, but not something I ever thought to feel smug about. But I’m glad the Scalzi Compound Bev-Fridge brings you joy!
I do in fact have 2 drink refrigerators. A 40 btl white wine & 100 btl red wine refrigerator. There is also a dedicated shelf in the food fridge for Dr. Pepper 10!
No, we don’t. My husband drinks coffee, vitamin water at work, and milk after he gets home. I drink tea in the morning, water from then till dinner, then milk. During the summer, we also indulge in a Stewart’s root beer with dinner. My daughter drinks milk.* All day long. Although she will also go for apple juice if milk’s not available. So our fridge is stocked with a minimum of 3 gallons of milk at any one time.
*No really. Several of her friend’s moms will buy a full gallon of milk just for her when she’s on a sleep over.
I know someone who has THREE SEPARATE drinks fridges. They bought a house from someone who was apparently really serious about chilling various forms of alcohol, and since they don’t drink alcohol, every former wine- or beer- or whatever-fridge now holds various non-alcoholic drinks . . . not sure if that counts, since it wasn’t exactly my friends’ choice to have that many fridges, but still. Three drinks fridges.
We don’t have a drinks fridge, but now that we have a garage, it’s on our list of things to add to the household eventually. Probably when we upgrade our current fridge.
My parents lived in their last house long enough to pay off the mortgage. Their old fridge was wearing out, but not entirely dead, so they moved that fridge to the garage (which became their drinks fridge), and bought a new one for the kitchen.
To everyone’s surprise, the garage fridge was still working when they sold that house, retired, and bought a new (to them) place for cash. It’s still the garage fridge, and that’s still where my father keeps his soft drinks.
I have a Best Buy credit card. A few years ago, one of their “back to school!” emails was advertising a dorm fridge for a pretty reasonable price, and I especially liked the fact it had a small freezer on top (none of the fridges I had when I actually *lived* in a dorm had a freezer to speak of). The dorm fridge was cheap enough, I bought it for my office, and that’s now *my* drinks fridge. I bought a small microwave (they’re dirt-cheap these days, if you don’t want anything fancy) and put it on top of the fridge. I keep a couple of frozen meals and a couple of pints of ice cream in the freezer compartment.
Lest anyone think that seems like overkill, when I could just walk to the kitchen–I’m disabled. My office is a lot closer to the bedroom than the kitchen is. The whole point of the dorm fridge was that I wouldn’t have to walk all the way to the other end of the house (where the kitchen is), if all I wanted was a Coke. I keep the actual unrefrigerated twelve-packs in the kitchen, but I bring enough of the cans back to my office that I only have to restock my fridge every couple of days. Anything I can do to walk less, and conserve my energy, is a good thing.
Thats a lot of beverages….
We have a min-refrigerator in the basement that is a “drinks fridge.” However, now that youngest son has moved back home to finish off the remainder of his college education, it appears to be filled with exercise recovery beverages.
We have a wine cooler that my husband picked out from the employee gift catalog last year. I think we’re more amused than smug. It does a decent job of keeping drinks cold. At the moment, it’s stocked with 3 Mountain Dew Kickstarts, 2 hard ciders, and a can of iced tea.
Sure, we all thought Scalzi had made it with the 10-year contract. But no, it was when he installed the drinks fridge in the garage that we knew he really made it. However you can’t fit a deli plate in the fridge. For that you need Warren Buffet level of success.
And is that Great Lakes Brewery on the bottom there? Great taste.
I first heard about a drinks fridge in an old William Gibson short story where he mentions a party at someone’s place where there is a beer fridge. For a brief while I had a drinks fridge in my garage, like you did. I also felt as if I’d “made it”, because it was in a garage that I owned (well, me and the bank, but it wasn’t rented was the point). But I don’t drink very much, beer or soda, and when the old fridge died that was the end of that.
I knew I had made it when a small wine cellar was wheeled into the kitchen of my apartment. I still have it. In vino happy life. Or something.
We did for awhile, in our basement, for my sons. However, it used a lot of electricity. The kitchen fridge was at the top of the stairs and the drinks fridge was at the bottom of the stairs. I eventually decided to stop paying the extra money for my offspring to not need to climb a flight of stairs.
Have one? No. Used to though.
Want one? Yes.
I drink a lot of diet soda, and mixing that with rum or vodka that has been kept cold is my almost daily end of day ritual to celebrate the survival of my 2 toddlers. It’s also great to have on hand while I do my 3d modeling and bedroom DJing progressive house, breaks, and trance sets.
No drinks fridge for me. I don’t drink enough soda or aloe vera juice to make one worthwhile. Stil, I am curious about tasting Diet Ginger Ale With Lemonade or Orange Vanilla Coke Zero.
In my office I have the dorm fridge that my daughter abandoned when she finished college. In theory, it’s to have healthy food so I eat good lunches. In practice, it’s a drinks fridge.
I have 1 Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi per day, the rest water. Additionally, a beer and/or prosecco about once a month. I don’t crave a drinks fridge but if I could have a garage freezer–not big enough for a season of venison, just enough so I can mix up my frozen foods–ah, that would be when I would feel part of the 1%.
We have a basement fridge that does hold drinks, mainly beer and a few diet sodas. It is also the overflow fridge for extra yogurt, cream, veggies, and stuff we don’t use every day.
We have a mini-fridge that we put drinks in to keep cold.
John
I have to say that based on the comments having a single drinks fridge is old news.
We have a large food fridge.
A drinks fridge.
A wine fridge.
2 ‘apartment’ fridges which are kept in each major bedroom usually keeping more drinks in them along with the odd bit of chocolate.
We need another fridge just to keep the flour cool and have had solar panels installed to help all five fridges plus freezer run. This is in the UK to provide an international dimension.
I don’t feel smug but it definitely feels luxurious. Especially when the 5 coffee machines are included with the upstairs and downstairs kettles.
This might explain why we never feel we have a need to travel when on holiday.
Ive taken to drinking Polar water. Zero calorie. No artificial anything. Ingredient list is something like “carbonated water, natural flavors”.
Through some form of transubmutation, i believe dark sorcery may be involved, the stuff tastes pretry good without any calories or sweetners.
No caffeine though. Which is a pity.
But otherwise, yeah, you can drink a variety of flavors, lime, raspberry, orange, which is nice cause it lets you change things up a bit.
During my life as a homebrewer and beer-obsessive, I had something known as a DBR (Dedicated Beer Refrigerator). It was a great old thick-doored fridge from the 60s and I eventually drilled through the door and added two taps so I could keep Cornelius kegs of homebrew ready to drink. In my experience, most brewers have a DBR. You could call yours a DSR.
Now I have a 48-bottle wine cooler in the kitchen island (hey, it came with the house — might be why I bought the house).
One, no, I don’t have a drinks fridge and, two, diet root beer is a sin against nature (not to mention against root beer) and there’s not enough brain bleach to wipe out that memory!
At my lakehouse, we have a small pantry that is dubbed the party closet (it stores paper plates, cups, towels, etc) and it has a drink fridge which is GLORIOUS.
We have a regular fridge in the garage (e.g. we put more than just drinks in it: food overflow (generally revolving around parties), both frozen and refrigerated; stuff we don’t want the kids to realize we have (they never check remember to check it when hunting for munchies); etc etc.
Nice to see you’re making do with the new weak Coke Zero. I do too, but still miss the old stuff.
Have you tried Dr. Pepper Ten? I like it a lot, much better than Diet Dr. Pepper, though it’s annoying that the only forms I can get it in at the store are 2 L bottles and 12 oz. cans. The gas station nearby used to have the 20 oz. bottles.
We have a second refrigerator in the basement, but it’s not turned on. It’s just sitting there. Waiting. Hoping to one day be useful again.
We have a fridge and a chest type freezer in the (attached)garage. Such luxury. Not just for drinks though, we bring groceries home and unload them directly into the fridge/freezer/pantry shelves out there. No lugging heavy bags into the house all at once. We bring things in a few meals at a time, and store the things we “should” snack on like veggies and fruits in the fridge in the kitchen. If you want ice cream or a coke (high octane only here) you can walk the extra 12 steps to the garage to work a few of the calories off.
I’ve seen the thermostats on that particular style go a bit wonky, be prepared.
I have two main drinks of choice: tap water poured straight from the faucet and hot tea. Neither benefits from the fridge, so it’s not a thing I desire. But I can imagine people who drink cold drinks might like a place to keep them if they are running out of room in their fridge.
My girlfriend and I have a drink fridge with Coke and mixers, a wine fridge, and a drink shelf in her freezer with vodka, triple sec, rum, and tequila, kept cold for frozen “froo froo” drinks.
That is what my regular fridge looks like, minus the alcohol. Where’s the food? I eat out!
I didn’t realize drinks fridges were making it. We’ve had one for ages- it was free, some business was getting rid of it. Periodically it gets filled food (blame Costco runs) and I get annoyed. We also moved it to the basement from the garage so it would work better. It turns out that most fridges are only designed to work with so much of a temperature differential to their surroundings, so it wasn’t working so well in extreme heat or cold.
I had a friend in high school (in Ohio) who had a separate fridge for drinks and I thought she was RICH. It just seemed so . . . abundant. And they only had two kids! You could have a Coke any time! My mother would only buy pop twice a month, and if you drank your share too quickly, too bad for you. As an adult, I drink very little of anything cold other than water, and Chicago tap water is really good, so no need for the fridge now that I can afford it. But my brother, with four children, has a second fridge in the basement pantry, packed with gallons of milk, frozen vegetables, cheese, his beer, etc.
agree, the separate drinks fridge always seemed to me a marker of ‘making it’.
Most of the houses around us have one but we don’t. The house was a foreclosure and didn’t have any appliances, once we’d bought all those there wasn’t much left for a spare fridge..
also I have qualms about the amount of electricity the second fridge would burn through.
We did get a second freezer when my son took up hunting, for the good red meat..
Our neighbor has a massive custom drinks fridge with wood panels and doors, got it from a friend when they remodeled the kitchen for the third time.. that’s real ‘making it’ money, we haven’t managed to remodel even once yet.
Fridge costs – http://blog.gvea.com/wordpress/?p=933
1992 fridge
Initial cost: $25 at a garage sale (or maybe you moved the old fridge from the kitchen and it was free.) Regardless of how cheap it was, it’s still costing you a lot.
5 years of electricity to operate it: $1,415
Total: $1,440
New fridge (Energy Star)
Initial cost: $674
5 years of electricity to operate it: $450
Total: $1,124
I have a drinks fridge, but as a home brewer it holds three 5 gallon kegs of home-brew, plus a few bottles etc. in the door, and has taps on the front. The freezer section is hops storage for future batches.
Really old refrigerators are serious energy hogs. Our electric company actually used to have a program where they would GIVE you a new fridge if your old one was old enough. We looked into it when replacing our 1988 fridge, but decided the fridges they had on offer weren’t what we wanted. They would have been perfectly good second fridges if we had been in the market for that sort of thing, though. We have a rather large primary refrigerator, so now that there are only two of us in the house we can easily fit in any drinks we wish to keep cold. What we do run short of now and then is freezer space, but that usually indicates that we haven’t been eating up the stuff in our freezer on schedule.
In the town I grew up in bacon the 60s probably half of the homes had a spare refrigerator in either the garage or a shed that was full of drinks, with lots of beer being common.
It was a small enough town that folks knew each other, and the local mailman who walked the route was acquainted with most everyone. And most everyone told him that, if it was a hot summer’s day and he needed a cool, refreshing drink, to help himself to anything in the refrigerator in the garage/shed.
I think Harry the Mailman finished most of his deliveries in the summer half in the bag. Even better, he provided perfect cover when a Dad went out to the refrigerator, found there were number of beers missing, and came in to draw down on us high school kids. A puzzled look, a “dunno–hasn’t Harry been by delivering the mail?” usually worked and clued us in that it was time to raid a different refrigerator.
(Those beers, of course, weren’t Great Lakes craft brews. Miller Genuine Draft, PBR, Schmidt’s of Philadelphia and Bud were most common with an occasional Ballantine, Stroh’s–fire-brewed!–or National Bohemian thrown in. Michelob was for snobs.)
I looked long and hard at that interior. All I’m gonna say is, “Where is the pale ale? Stout? Cream ale? Scorch ale? Brown ale?”
Don’t forget to rotate cans out of the back. You wouldn’t necessarily think it, but that soda can go bad.
Scorch ale. Now that would be interesting. Scotch ale, however, is what was meant!
And I’m not envious of much, but I am envious of the beer fridge a friend of mine has in his finished basement. It’s got a full clear glass door, like the coolers in your local convenience store, so everything is visible. That has got to be the best beer fridge ever. (Except he’s got to hide the good stuff back behind all the beers he bought on sale. You make sure the Chimay isn’t front and center where it’s visible to anyone and everyone.)
I too have a drinks fridge. The only part I’m smug about when it comes to said drinks fridge is the selection of whiskey I keep in it.
We have two houses on the compound here. Mom & I in the little one; brother, wife, daughter & four grandchildren in the bigger one.
It may be just because it gets warm in Arizona, but drinks refrigerators are not new. I remember the first time anyone I knew got a second ‘fridge for outside storage of drinks. It was in the mid 60’s and the family in question did seem to be well off, if a bit ostentatious. It certainly was impressive to us kids.
Now? Now Mom & I have an extra refrigerator on the back porch for drinks & things you don’t get into often like bags of flour and hot cocoa mix. Next to it is an upright freezer for the side of beef, summer fruit put up last year, extra pizzas and the like.
My brother has a refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen, another refrigerator in the washroom for lunch bag stuff & farmer’s market produce, and a third, full-sized ‘fridge out on the patio for ice and drinks; mostly water, Gatorade, and vitamin-mineral-money water.
There’s just something about 114 degree temperatures that makes you want to preserve as much cold as you can.
Love that they sell diet Barq’s in Ohio! As a recent transplant from south Louisiana to southeast Idaho (and loving every second of every day) I was pleasantly surprised to find out diet Barq’s is sold here. It’s one of my few connections to my former life, and it still tastes just like the sugared version.
FL Transplant wrote: In the town I grew up in bacon the 60s…
I assume you meant “back in the 60s,” but perhaps your autocorrect takes into account the blog you’re posting to.
I’m pretty happy to be in Canada, and healthcare in the US sounds like such a nightmare… but “Vanilla and Orange Vanilla versions of Coke Zero“?! And I bet — nay, I am certain — you also have Cherry Coke Zero as an option. It’s a strong case for looking into immigrating that you’re laying out here. After all, housing costs (which would allow one to have a drink fridge and the space for a drink fridge) and Coke Zero are the things that affect your daily happiness and well-being.
I don’t drink enough ‘other’ drinks to have a drink fridge. I do have a wine cooler, does that count?
And what, no diet Mt. Dew?!?!
Yes. However, in addition to beer, our drink fridge also holds bicycle tires and inner tubes. I buy them on sale and they keep better when not exposed to light, heat, or circulating air.
I basically made my husband’s year when I suggested he get a beer fridge to keep down in the basement. He is now the envy of his guy friends.
My beers don’t last long enough to merit a whole entire fridge.
Please tell me that the freezer of the drinks fridge is filled with ice cream. Floats all around!
Tomorrow I’m getting a small wine fridge (and the house to go with it) and honestly I’m not sure what we’ll put in it. We just don’t drink a lot of wine, but the shape isn’t super conducive to cans or cider bottles.
I’m sure we’ll find something. Maybe I’ll use it to ferment pickles.
Having a second fridge also means more space for refrigerator magnets!
We do have a dorm fridge upstairs for drinks. Our rental house had a fridge, so our personal fridge is in the garage, but it is primarily additional freezer space.
Mike.W is totally right. I had several cans of soda where the soda ate through the can and leaked all over the cabinet.
Made me re-think drinking Diet Coke with Lime.
We have a drinks fridge. It was my grandparents 1964 Coldspot, and it’s been moved across IL twice. Right now it’s in our game room and filled with local craft beers, drink mixers, and pop/water. We’ve covered it with magnets from our travels and interactive magnet sets for people to play with between shooting pool or playing games.
It still works like a charm after 50+ years, and I’m so glad to have it in my house. It seems odd to have fond family memories around a fridge, but this fridge was in my grandparents rec room when I was a child, and we had many family gatherings in that room. I remember getting my grandpa a beer from it while watching Cubs games, and the sound it makes when opening or closing (a distinct think as the latch releases or relocks) takes me right back there. I’d post a picture of it (because it’s too awesome not to share), but I don’t think I can post a pic in the comments.
No drinks fridge, don’t need one for ice tea and milk.
A couple I know, when the ice maker broke on their old fridge, kept the old one when they bought the replacement. It’s now living in their basement, it occasionally handles overflow food purchases but it’s mainly for baking weeks. Seriously, holiday cookie baking there calls for at least one case of eggs from Costco, and once the baking supplies start to move upstairs there’s room to chill cookie dough.
And here I thought you would be more of a Rhinegeist Brewery fan or Columbus brewery than a Great Lakes guy. A+. Happy to see the Fitz. Did you know it is considered an example of style for beer judges judging such things?
Nostalgia: Only a few years ago, as a tourist, I visited a regional dump serving three towns, it was just like the dump of my childhood (In the city we use garbage cans) Chatting with the gate shack guy, he explained that a fellow comes around with a rod to suck out the (R-14?) from all the refrigerators, as an environmental thing.
In my own big city dump, the guy at the gate won’t let you in unless your vehicle has a load to drop off. Those are his orders.
Sometimes, like Philip K. Dick reaching for a light bulb string that isn’t there, I wait for my refrigerator to go click when I close the door. But no, it’s all magnets now. As a boy our fridge had a handle on the inside, (cool!) so a trapped child could get back out.
Here on the Great Plains, nearly all my city’s streets were laid down after ice boxes were no longer needed. A fellow in my toastmasters club did a speech explaining the new fangled technology behind his modern “beer cooler.”
Nope, and I never will. Soda is terrible for the bones, and having something just for drinks wastes energy. I drink water, tea, coffee, and occasionally milk or wine. That’s good enough.
We did when I was a teenager – at least in one house we lived in. Similar setup, old fridge in the garage, largely full of soda (though almost none of the diet variety) freezer full of frozen pizza and other teenager foodstuffs. It wasn’t THE reason all our friends spent most Friday evenings, Saturdays, and school breaks at our place, but it certainly didn’t hurt. My mother insists there were no ulterior motives in her allowing my brother and I to have our own “dorm suite” by the time we were entering high school but she certainly didn’t mind the fact that all the kids were at her house, just a staircase away rather then who-knows-where-doing-god-knows-what. The soda fridge was a bit wonky (hence its replacement) and would often start to freeze any sodas touching the back wall near the coils, this led to the occasional exploded soda, but more importantly, to this day I associate certain 90s shows and movies and super nintendo game sountracks with slushy Pepsi and the little square pepperoni chunks on Tombstone frozen pizza.
I used to have a drink fridge, but last week I re-purposed it as a food fridge.
It started its life in 2001 as a dorm fridge for my daughter at Georgia Tech. When she no longer needed it I took it to school to use as my lunch (and drink) fridge in my classroom.. I’m a teacher. Then I retired a year ago, so I took it home to use exclusively as a diet coke fridge. Except now the school gave our robotics team our own classroom – an unused physics lab in the College Academy. I no longer depended on another teacher for space to build robots. (I continue to coach the team even though retired.) Our school is a high-poverty school, and we feed our team members dinner on meeting nights and during Saturday meetings. My drinks fridge was needed to store food (and drinks) for the kids.
I really didn’t need a dedicated fridge for drinks, since I live alone and my regular fridge is mostly empty other than drinks anyway.
I’ve had a dorm sized beer and soda fridge in my dining room for several years. It has come in handy, and I don’t have to clutter my big fridge with all that. I recently remodeled my kitchen and dining room and had a space built into a cabinet just for it. It’s great for entertaining.
I chuckled when I read the first bit of this post – we do have a drinks fridge, and it happened pretty much the same way that you’ve described. We had our oldest son’s college dorm-sized fridge in the garage for many years and in my mind it worked well. When we replaced our main refrigerator, though, my husband was very excited by the idea of having a drinks fridge – as one apparently does.
No drinks frig., no soda pop of any kind. We have a mini-fridge in the garage for storing veg garden and apple tree overflow. We pretty much always have our water bottles with us. A cold beer on the weekend has been known to happen.
We bought a minifridge to go into our basement rec room shortly after moving into the house we’re in. About all it keeps is bottled water, so it is basically the “drink frig”, as there’s really no good ways to get water that don’t require a trip to the kitchen upstairs.
We call it our beer fridge. The freezer holds pint glasses.
We have a freezer devoted to ice cream of various insane flavors. “All bought on sale,” I have been informed. (But do you really want to buy 5 pints every time your current favorite flavor goes on sale? The ice cream fridge was NOT my idea but it is ever more luxurious than a drinks fridge. : ) I have a little room to add frozen junk like my pizza bagels that my family abhors and smushes around in our normal-person-fridge. Solely ice cream leaves a *little* space for more junk food.
Drinks fridge, we have, eh, that’s old news! Beer and Gatorade. Part of an old thing of Limoncello I got when I was feeling particularly European. But I’m happy for you, reaching this new level of luxurious modern living! Very exciting.
Ooh, I WANT one.
We drink a lot of carbonated flavored water, zero calories. We also drink gin and tonic and other cocktails in the evening, and sparkling white wine with dinners. No special fridge for any of the drinks.
Also want to add that I too am pleased and surprised that the Campbell award has so quickly been renamed, and I have no problem with the new name either. Sometimes the comments are closed too quickly, although that’s up to the owner, not the commenters.
Soda? Isn’t it pop in OH? Lol. I don’t know where the cut off is. I’m from back East, and 25 years in MI, I still can’t call it pop.
Anyway, I love my extra fridge!!!! Especially around the holidays.
Be careful in the garage, though. I had mine in the garage in my last house, and it got so cold out there that the soda froze then exploded. Mine is in the basement, here.
I don’t but seeing this I want one
Lol 😂 cheese!
When I was a kid, I thought it would be the height of luxury to have my own soda fountain. I imagined pouring myself a Coke or Dr. Pepper whenever I felt like it, and I would be the envy of all the other kids.
Back then, refills on sodas cost money. Granted, it was just 10 cents or so, but still. Kids today don’t know the struggle.
I did the same thing when we bought a new fridge. Put the 20 year old one out in the garage, mainly for drinks. Thank heavens we saved it because the new one is a lemon. The old one has saved us a lot of pain as a solid backup.
Would love a drinks fridge. Was super excited when we got the house to get a chest freezer for the garage, and we have a shelf that’s basically for drinks overflow (so my pantry has other dry goods in it) out there as well. But it’s not refrigerated. Some day…
Here in central Mass. we are blessed with the Polar soda company in Worcester. They make awesome cranberry soda, ginger ale, pomegranate, and ‘orange dry’ which is the best ever. All in ‘diet’ too. They even have a cool mascot. (Google ‘Orson the Polar bear’.)
Does a fermentation fridge and a keg fridge for homebrew beer count?
Yep, the old fridge went into the garage and is loaded with diet soft drinks. A shameful amount of diet soda. The addiction is strong…and it’s not even the caffeine.
I’d love a drinks fridge, but would love an ice cube machine even more, so that’s where my dinnertable-lobbyism is focused. Also, since I live in temperate climate, I can usually have a small drinks stash just outside the door from October through April, backed up by my garage, so I still get by.
I have switched to “mostly water, but sometimes diet soda” myself and I really wish Dr Pepper Zero/Diet Dr Pepper would catch on over here. Most stores don’t even stock the regular stuff (the bigger ones do though, so it is readilyavailable), but the diet one? Only in the small 11 oz cans. (I prefer to get the larger bottles even if I drink it over the course of several days) and they are way to expensive, because they’re imported
While soda based on Mate tea is fairly popular I also haven’t found a single diet mate soda :( The good news is that it caued me to make my own!
We don’t have a Drinks Fridge (though I wouldn’t mind Tammy having a fridge just for her filtered water which she drinks about a gallon of daily!), but my uncle had an old fridge he drilled a hole in the door of which he stuck a keg’s spigot through so he always had cold beer to hand.
We have a dorm-sized drinks fridge, but.the broccoli is making inroads…
Wow, popular post! I do not envy the separate drinks fridge, though I am happy you’re happy. I envy the variety of flavored drinks available to you. Maybe I need to shop at different stores.
No, don’t need a drinks fridge. It’s environmentally unsound to use old fridges for _anything_. I will jump for joy when I finally get my root cellar…
We have had a Drinks Fridge in our garage for many years and have felt smug about it. But ours stores mostly beer, with a bit of milk and juice. When I was growing up my favorite uncle had an impressive drink fridge from the 1950’s that even sounded cool when it kerthunked closed. Always thought it was a sign of appreciating the simple rather than extravagant luxuries in life.
Edmond Fitzgerald is the best porter
We drink about 90% tap water (I live near Sintra in Portugal and the water is fantastic), otherwise we either drink wine (which is not refrigerated).
So no fridge for drinks here.
On another note, how can you drink Dr. Pepper? Its so sickeningly medicine tasting …
But hey, I’m European.
I can’t have a drinks fridge – in fact I can’t keep more than one Pepsi in the refrigerator at a time or I will guzzle it all day. I pull one out and I put one in and try to limit myself to two a day
I’m just super impressed and a little bit weirded out that so many of your readers have so much to say about soda.
Something of a drinks and girl scout cookies fridge, but I always appreciate that at some point mid-winter, beverage storage has to be suspended, as the frozen temperatures seep into the fridge and make things start to explode…
When I was a kid (mid 70s) one of my friends had a soda fountain in her living room. That was so cool. We made ourselves sick by mixing our own sodas with too much syrup.
We don’t have a drinks fridge currently. I’m kind of against the concept because of my admittedly inconsistent sense of frugality and environmentalism. Canned sodas cost more per ounce than bottled soda, and it leads to more waste when people forget which soda is theirs, and open a new one rather than risk accidentally drinking from someone else’s can. The idea of trucks carrying all of that mostly water to the stores so it can be stocked on the shelves, then taken home by designated household shoppers in minivans, where half of it ends up warm and flat, and poured down the drain…I’m thinking we don’t deserve to have an Amazon rainforest. The same goes for individual sized bottles of water.
mmmmm…Barqs – I grew up on that living in Cincy. Alas, they don’t seem to have it in north eastern Florida. I miss it. And Skyline. A cheese coney and a Barqs – it doesn’t get any better.
I have a what I refer to as our “Pimp” fridge. (Before anyone gets upset, somehow this came from watching episodes of “Pimp my Ride” and “Cribs” on MTV years ago). That said, I am envious of the breadth of your selections and how nice and full yours is. Mine might have a case or two of Coke or Pellegrinos in it.
I want to know what is behind door number two… the secret Scalzi ice cream stash I presume?!? (that or the frozen burrito ingredients storage facility)
Yes, in the garage, although it does also handle overflow from the refrigerator in the kitchen too.
@ Nelson1457
“And what, no diet Mt. Dew?!?!”
Absolutely not! Mr. Scalzi is a decent human being.
My old dorm fridge (extra large, for a dorm) became our drink fridge. I’m actually kind of surprised it’s lasted as long as it has
I have tried recently to get into the Coke Zero, and off the sugar sodas, but I just love sugar TOO MUCH!!!
And, died/zero sodas just taste…off…to me.
I am wholeheartedly in approval of a drinks fridge. :)
Do your diet sodas ever expire? Had some Diet Dr Pepper do that once and it just tasted like salty soda.
No current drinks fridge, but when I was a kid, we did have a second fridge in the garage. It held a lot of drinks, but not exclusively drinks. Just a lot of them.
In case you’re not aware, keep an eye on the garage temperature. If it drops below the temperature the fridge is set at, the compressor will shut down, and your freezer temperature will start to rise. If the garage is unheated and poorly insulated, that’s liable to happen a few times a year in rural Ohio.
I do not have a drinks fridge, but I remember the first time I moved into an apartment that had a washer/dryer inside the apartment. I took the opportunity to make sure all of my clothes were, for once, clean at the same time, standing nekkid, folding underwear, feeling like I had passed to the good side of the golden barrier.
Back when we had two teenagers at home, we had a kind of reverse fridge/freezer. The bottom, larger part was a freezer, the upper part could be set to be either a fridge or a freezer. We bought in bulk to feed the growing appetites, and feared the occasional power outage that would trash our prudent bulk buys. Now that it’s the two of us, the freezer is still there, but it’s currently occupied by tools and other misc. garage storage items. We were shocked by how much electricity it was consuming.
As a one fridge person who grew up in a one fridge household, this whole drinks fridge idea seems ostentatious. I had to double check that it wasn’t a gold plated drinks fridge. But if I was a billionaire, I would totally have an Otter Pops freezer, so who am I to judge.
If you can get through all of that before the diet stuff goes off, I am impressed.
We have a food fridge and a fancy-schmancy wine fridge in the kitchen, a drinks fridge in the garage, and a dorm fridge my kids no longer needed in my basement lair.
We also have a chest freezer I am afraid to look in. There may be a Yeti living in that thing.
Congratulations. Welcome to the good life.
We have a second refrigerator out in the garage. It’s mainly an overflow freezer, but we always have a few bottles of champagne chilling out there.
No, but I have a mango fridge. With a chip freezer above it. In mango season I can buy them for under $2 each so I eat a lot of mangoes (I like mangoes). Having a fridge that holds four trays of mangoes is awesome. Likewise frozen chips for the air fryer. Sadly, much as I would like to live on chips and mangoes my body would reject me if I tried
I don’t enjoy very cold beverages (and I don’t drink carbonated beverages at all), so the extra fridge in our basement is called “the overflow fridge.” We use it to store all the bounty from the Farmers’ Market at this time of year. Around holidays, it’s invaluable as storage for big meal fixings.
Glad you finally feel as though you have arrived at the pinnacle of success with your drinks fridge, sir. We all have different ways of marking that milestone, and I am glad you have reached yours. Enjoy.
We have one because a friend of mine who remodeled apartment blocks offered us one for fifty bucks. It keeps water, Gatorade and some pop cold most of the year, and aids in thawing turkeys and hams if I remember to get them out soon enough, and storing various other holiday dishes. I do not feel like I’ve arrived.
I don’t have a drink fridge, but I have a giant upright freezer. I live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, so every year I either grow fruit or go to local farms and stock up. In the middle of winter I can gaze at my giant fruit collection with pride.
Plus, I can stock it with a lot of home made ice cream.
An orthopedic surgeon treating my sweetie for an unfortunate nighttime fall on the way down to the kitchen from the bedroom recommends bedroom dorm fridges for everyone over 35. We are still deciding, but we have the actual hand-written prescription for it!
The thing *I* always wanted a spare refrigerator for was to make a smoker, Jacques Pepin-style. Stick it out in the backyard, with a hole cut low in the door to vent the smoke out of, and cold-smoke fish and birds and pastrami and sausage and ham and stuff.
https://www.amazon.com/Jacques-Pépins-Complete-Techniques-Pépin/dp/1579121659
I personally don’t have a second fridge, no garage or basement. And I don’t really want one, I’m not sure what I’d put in it.
But yeah, that’s one of those things that feels kind of decadent, while still being reasonably practical and justifiable. No reason to feel smug, but there it is.
My Grandma and Grandpa were the envy of friends and family, because not only did they put a full second kitchen in their basement for canning and summer baking, Grandpa dug out a root cellar when the basement was poured. Didn’t have to walk outside in the snow, plus he made the floor about knee height so you never had to crouch down. All pop and beer went in the root cellar, only a few at a time allowed in the “good fridge” upstairs. They were living the dream.
No, thanks, on the drinks fridge. Too lazy to go to the garage for a drink. (Also, don’t actually have a garage as such.)
But I sure would like a dedicated bee freezer, for freezing hive frames so the wax moth eggs would die and the comb would stay good till I needed it.
11 years ago, almost to the day, a YouTuber called MrChiCity3 posted this about his fridge setup:
global warming much?
As of Saturday midmorning, I count 125 comments about a humble refrigerator. With all due respect to world peace, sometimes the simple pleasures are what we talk about.
Strange: Nobody’s written a poem yet.
I know someone who has a tortoise fridge. Apparently it helps them hibernate safely.
Sean:
Are you sure?
As of
Saturday midmorning
I count
125 comments
about
a humble refrigerator
With all
due respect to world peace
sometimes
the simple pleasures
are what
we talk about.
We have an extra fridge downstairs and the upper shelves are where I store my microbrews (bottom are for pop and mix for my wife – she doesn’t drink beer). Here’s a link to the last WP entry that featured restocking the beer section: https://jeroljohnson.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/ready-for-spring/