What’s In Our Drink Fridge (and our new bev station!)

Here’s a peek into our drink fridge and the deets on our new bev station for coffee and tea! Plus some of my favorite non-water drinks these days. 

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Our New Drink Fridge

One of my favorite additions to our new kitchen is a drink fridge! What some people might fill their secondary fridge with rare vintage wine, we have filled it with all kinds of canned drinks: regular and NA beers, regular and NA wines, seltzers, Spindrift and more. I slide white wine bottles on the bottom shelf when I need to chill them. 

This fridge has been great to declutter the drinks out of our main refrigerator. We used to store beer, wine, and seltzers in the main fridge in the bottom drawer, just cans rolling around, and now they all go here. It’s been so freeing! (And a luxury, I know.)

Our fridge is this model by Avallon. It’s basically a fancy mini fridge designed for cans, but you can also store food in it if you want – like our half and half for coffee! The shelves slide out so you can see in the back.

How to easily transfer a pack of seltzers

We used to use the built-in dispenser cut out in the case of seltzers to store our cans in the fridge. But to make our new fridge neater, I’ve been using the “push out method” to empty them all out at once and recycle the box. 

1. Make sure the cans are vertical in the case. 
2. Open one side of the cardboard. 
3. Rest the case on the shelf, open side in and open the back side on your knee. 
4. Push your arm through the case pushing all of the cans out in two neat rows!

Works with beer too 😉 

I have all of our drinks lined up vertically by type. 

Here are our current drink favorites!

Check out this post for my favorite nonalcoholic wines and beers!

Regular Beer

Thomas loves Basic City IPA, Our Daily Pils, and Narragansett. I almost always drink NA beer at home, but I might have to get a pumpkin beer or two too : ) 

Regular Wine

I recently ordered some canned wines from Maker and love them! Gone are the days when canned wine was made from leftovers and you didn’t know what you were going to get. These taste so great (and great for portion control)! The woman-owned company supports female and minority-led winemakers. I’ve tried the Cabernet Pfeffer, Sparkling Sauv Blanc, and Sparkling Rose so far and loved them. Get 15% off every order you place with my link (not just your first order!).

NA Beer

Team Athletic Brewing! There is not a better NA beer on the market. Our favorites are “the blue one, the pink one and the Cerveza.” We have a few seasonals in there too. Get 10% off your first order with KATHEATS.

• Run Wild IPA
• Free Wave Hazy IPA
• Cerveza with a lime

NA Wine

My two favorites are Surely and Wild AF! I like all of the wines these two make – the whites, the roses, and even the Surely chilled red. I noticed recently that Surely is now available at Amazon!

Seltzers + Boocha

• 365 Ginger + Lime from Whole Foods are our everyday house seltzers.
• We’ve been on a real Spindrift kick though! It’s such a great lunch drink or NA in a wine glass. Grapefruit for life. 
• DayPack Hop Water – I tried these from Athletic Brewing and they’re so good! If you love hops, you’ll love them. 
• We almost always have some local Mountain Culture Kombucha but it’s often the first thing gone, so that’s why it’s not in my pic!

CBD / THC Drinks

A new find, these drinks are made from hemp! I’d say you feel like you’ve had one glass of wine with the 2-3 mg versions. Relaxed without the effects of alcohol. 

• My favorite are Sipz. They are 2 mg and just the right amount to “feel it” but not feel it too much. I love the big cans too so you get a lot to drink. The grapefruit is my favorite of the flavors. Try the mixed pack. You can get 35% off with my link and the code SAVE35.
• Trail Happy taste GREAT, but I cannot handle the 5 mg size. I love the Berry Basil the best and Thomas loves the Arnold Palmer. 
• Brez taste more like a cocktail and I like them, but the cans are so tiny I can drink it in 10 minutes! I’d like my drink to last longer (they have bigger cans, but those are 5 mg and see above – can’t handle). 

Our New Coffee + Tea Station

These cabinets contain an appliance garage that we originally thought would house the toaster oven, Vitamix, and anything else we use regularly, like the tea kettle. We were going to have the coffeemaker and grinder out in the open counter next to the sink. 

But we made a big swap: toaster oven out and coffee in. We are loving this choice for a variety of reasons!

First, all the bevs are together. Coffeemaker, coffee grinder, tea kettle, and milk frother / hot chocolate maker. On the top shelf we have coffee filters, honey for tea, sugar, and hot chocolate mix. And remember the half and half is right next door in the mini fridge!

I’m also trying AG1 (green juice at home!) and so I put those supplies up here in the drink mixing station too this week!

And in the drawer below, we have all the drink things! Koozies, Thomas’s morning supplements, tea bags, stirring spoons, scissors for cutting the coffee bean bags, wine stoppers, and more. While I think it could use a bit of improvement in the organization vibe, it’s totally working for us. 

The best reason why these cabinets are my new favorite is because the coffee process is quite messy. There are always grinds on the counter surface, and coffee rings from when we refill our cups.

A typical day:

98% of the time, these doors remain closed! That little green cloth? It just lives there for mopping up spills. Thomas opens the doors at teatime / bedtime and closes them around 8 a.m. when coffee service is wrapping up. And I don’t even check to see if it’s messy!! Not my zone : ) 

We’re also both so happy with the coffee sink that is connected to filtered water. It makes his coffee prep so much faster with high-pressure filtered water (vs. making a stop at the big stick to rinse and then standing at the fridge waiting for the slow water to fill).

I hope all of these logistics are making sense because they have been life-changing for us in terms of ease and functionality!! All these little small things that we mindfully considered when we completed the reno (and in the days after moving in!).