SUIP!

I had a housewarming on Saturday. I recently and very happily moved into a large house in Woodstock with three of my childhood mates and one lovely woman after a year living on the mess of traffic and chip packets that is Rondebosch Main Road. We’ve worked very hard on the place: converted surplus building materials into tables and benches, battled with unstable curtain rails and painted a massive chalkboard wall, á la (500) Days of Summer. A celebration was in order, so my housemates called up their friends and put up an event on Facebook.

I called up Keg King.

Keg King is a Cape Town-based business that supplies draught beer for just about any kind of event you can think of. They supply weekend markets with local craft beer, run their own bar in the Cape Quarter, educate beer novices with their College of Beer evenings and supply starter kits for the budding homebrewer. They’re also really nice guys, to boot.

Despite the multifaceted nature of their business, using Keg King for private events is simple. Choose from a wide and still expanding list of keg options (including selections from SAB, Namibian Breweries, Mitchells, Camelthorn, Darling, Boston and Jack Black), how many kegs you want and whether you want a one-tap or two-tap unit.

Call them, place an order, and they deliver straight to your door.

It’s no frills come party day, either. Keg King delivers a compact cooling unit attached to a no-spill tap. Your keg and a small canister of CO2, which powers the pouring, are then attached within minutes. No plug points, no wastage, no mess.

Now all you need is 50 people and an iPod filled with awful dubstep.

We got one 30-litre keg of Jack Black lager for the party – nothing fancy, but something that we thought would please most of the crowd. And please it damn well did. The beer was fresh and ice cold, and the revelers loved filling up their own cups.

Fuel for a great evening, and the first of many keg nights to come.

All in all, the benefits of Keg King are numerous. It makes large parties easy, even for the more discerning drinker: there is simply no better way to bring 50 litres of your favourite microbrew into your house. It’s a gloriously simple and efficient system. Plus, it doesn’t leave hundreds of bottles and cans lying around the house.

Keg King operates in Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Durban. Visit http://www.kegking.co.za, or email mark@kegking.co.za to order your keg and let the beer and good times, quite literally, flow.

Well done, Holland. You’ve just made the best thing ever.

In a small village deep in the - ahem - nether of the world’s most notoriously party-friendly country, metalworkers Thomas Tolkamp and Dinand Veerbeek created a series of 400cc buggies, each equipped with comfortable bicycle-seats-cum-bar-stools, a fully-equipped driver’s station, a 3mm auxiliary input for mp3 players – and a keg.

That’s right. A keg.

The wistfully and confusingly named Cafe Buggy allows 50l of beer to be served, straight from the tap, at a blistering pace of 13km/h to anything up to 15 thirsty passengers. Although it can only go for 35km on one tank of petrol, this might very well be the best pub crawl accessory ever.

Since the construction of the first Cafe Buggy, Tolkamp and Verbeek have been inundated with requests to hire it for bachelors’ parties, so much so that they have built two further machines, each smaller and more refined than the last. The Cafe Buggy 3, a smaller, less cumbersome 8-seater, is even available for private purchase.

If you can’t live without this masterpiece of automotive engineering, visit www.decaferacer.nl, or email info@decaferacer.nl for more information.