Mini Fridges for Drinks
If you need a compact option to keep perishable foods cold, consider a mini fridge. Mini fridges are good for adding to areas that are far away from your home’s main refrigerator or if you want more refrigeration space in your kitchen. A mini fridge also makes a great dorm refrigerator because of its compact size.
Features in the Best Mini Fridges
- Freezers: Some of the best mini fridges have freezers entirely separate from the refrigerator, and others have a smaller, shelf-style freezer for freezing small items.
- Adjustable Glass Shelves: Shelves that slide in and out within the mini fridge cavity and shelves that flip vertically from hinges on the outside edges of the shelf allow you to customize space.
- Pantry Drawers: Refrigerator-width pantry drawers create a separate temperature zone for party trays and snack foods.
- Humidity-Control Drawers: These drawers allow you to store fruits and vegetables where you can see and keep them fresh with customizable humidity settings.
- Oversized Door Bins: Gallon-size door bins efficiently store milk, juice and 2-liter bottles of soda, making them easy to grab while taking up zero shelf space in your mini fridge.
Beverage Coolers
Beverage coolers are like mini fridges except they’re typically only used for drinks, as they don’t have the cooling power needed for perishable foods. You can use a drinks fridge indoors or outdoors, and they’re great for home bars, game rooms and grilling areas. When you’re looking to buy a beverage cooler, be sure to buy the right capacity. Many models note the capacity by specifying how many bottles or cans it can hold.
Wine Fridge or Wine Coolers
A good wine refrigerator provides refrigeration for bottled wines, ensuring you’re storing them at an optimal temperature before serving them. The best rated wine coolers help preserve the quality of the wine by keeping the humidity low and preventing the corks from drying out, shrinking and allowing oxygen to penetrate the bottles.
What’s a Wine Cooler? And Why Do I Need One?
If all you want is a chilled bottle of wine, your refrigerator will do the trick. But to continuously store wine, a wine refrigerator is the best option Refrigerators vibrate almost constantly, which causes naturally occurring sediments in the wine to reincorporate back into the wine during long-term storage. This can make the wine taste bitter. Also, due to refrigerators being opened and closed frequently, the temperature inside a refrigerator can vary enough to harm your wine’s flavor. A small wine fridge is designed specifically to preserve the integrity and flavor of your favorite bottles in a way a refrigerator isn’t equipped to.
Wine Fridge Features
One of the first things you should look for in a wine cooler is capacity. Know how many bottles you’ll want to cool and choose accordingly. Options range from coolers that can hold 12 bottles to coolers that can hold over 100 bottles.
Also, some wine coolers have two temperature zones to allow you to store and chill different kinds of wine. You can have one zone for red wines and the other for white and sparkling wines. Finally, wine comes in many kinds of bottles. You might need to have adjustable racks in your wine cooler if you’re planning on storing large bottles. If space is an issue, a wine cooler fridge doesn’t need to take up a ton of space. There are under-counter wine cooler options that take up less space and fit inconspicuously in your kitchen.
Kegerators
For the beer aficionado, kegerators bring the bar to you, making it easy to have a pint of your favorite beer in the comfort of your home.
Before you buy a kegerator or mini kegerator, make sure you get the kegerator for the right keg size. Kegs come in half barrels (15.5 gallons/161 pounds), quarter barrels and slim barrels (7.75 gallons/87 pounds) and mini kegs (1.33 gallons/13 pounds). There are kegerators that can fit under the counter, ones made for outdoors and some that can stand alone in your home wherever you need it. Kegerator prices vary based on size and capabilities but can ultimately save you money by keeping your favorite brew on tap at home.