One of the most common questions we get asked here at servemydrink.com is:
“Can You Use A Wine Cooler For Beer?”
It makes sense, after all, that you might want to dual-purpose your wine cooler. Maybe you enjoy a beer now and again or maybe you’ve got a friend or partner who doesn’t drink wine but prefers to drink beer. In an ideal world, it would seem logical to store both of your preferred beverages in the same wine cooler or wine fridge.
The short answer is yes, you can use a wine cooler for beer – after all, there are no wine cooler police or officials out there who might knock on your door to inspect your wine cooler and ensure you’re only storing wine in it! But, seriously, it ultimately comes down to the temperature your wine cooler is set at.
As we’ve discussed previously, different types of wine prefer different temperatures, you can read more about wine storage temperature here. So your wine cooler could be set anywhere from 5-18℃ or 40-65℉. If the beer that you like to drink is happy being stored within that temperature range at a similar or same temperature as your wine, then you’re golden, life is easy, chuck some beer in the cooler with your wine and enjoy life!
But, some beers prefer to be colder! If you like a nice cold beer on a hot day, you’re probably used to beer at regular refrigerator temperature which is around 3℃ or 37℉. To learn more about what temperature your preferred beer likes to be stored at, check out this article from Copper and Oak.
Dual Zone Wine And Beer Fridge
If your beer needs to be colder than your wine, one option you have is to buy a dual-zone wine cooler and set one zone to your beer temperature and one zone to your wine temperature. Sure, it’s designed for different temperatures for your red and white wines, but, assuming the wine cooler has the right temperature capacity (ie. it gets cold enough) then you could definitely use a dual-zone wine cooler in this way.
To be honest, this is the biggest difficulty – most dual zone wine coolers won’t be able to go as low as 3℃ or 37℉. Most will only get as low as 5℃ or 41℉. This is where you would need to decide, is a couple of degrees going to bother you? We know a lot of Australians in particular, who would definitely want their beer icy cold, so the dual-zone wine cooler might not be ideal for them. If you’re an ice-cold beer person you might want to stick with storing your beer in the regular refrigerator!
Half Wine Half Beer Fridge
Stop! Hold the front page! We’ve just discovered a new dual zone wine cooler that has one zone with a temperature range of 36-72℉ or 2-22℃! That’s cold enough to even keep the Australians happy!
Full disclosure – we have not actually used or tested this wine cooler, just stumbled across it on Amazon while trying to find a wine cooler that might be useful in storing beer. It might be just the thing for you if you want to use your wine cooler for beer as well as wine. Check out the Whynter 24″ Built-In French Door Dual Zone Wine and Beer Cooler.
By the way, if any of you do decide to try out the Whynter 24″ Built-In French Door Dual Zone Wine and Beer Cooler, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it – there are only so many wine coolers our team can manage to assess!
