Cocktails are so much more than just any chilled drink. A cold beer may do the trick for some but there is a certain Summer expectation being met on a Saturday afternoon, sitting in the sun holding a refreshing cocktail with your favorite combination of vodka, fruitless and blended ice.

The Old Fashioned. The ingredients vary for this cocktail but it is often made up with Angostura, syrup and whiskey, with an orange twist. It is sweet and citrusy without being sickly. Sometimes, it will be poured over an ice glacier almost as big as the glass. It doesn’t melt as quickly as ice cubes which keeps the drink chilled a little while longer.

The Ginlet. One of the most refreshing cocktails and appropriate for the Summer months. Its ingredients are gin and Rose’s lime juice with a lime wedge. Gin is often used instead of vodka which infuriates some traditionalists. However, each variety is strong and possesses the ability to quench your thirst and can make you forget about his the heat that was overwhelming you. At least for a few minutes.

Sangria. A fabulous mix of wine and something with a little more kick. Although, fundamentally, it is nothing more than a traditional Spanish punch, it can taste different depending upon where you drink it as bartenders often like to be creative with this drink.

The Southside. Tastes just like a mojito with the only real difference being that rum is used instead of gin. A popular drink, it can be ordered from most popular bars. This is a great drink to have in hand when relaxing by the pool.

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Most important of all though is to open up your bar fridge and take out some nice cold beers and sodas and put them in you brand new portable mini fridge emblazoned with the colors and motif of your favorite team.

When you get to the parking lot you will not have to pay those inflated prices that the commercial vans charge for their plastic cups with very little liquid in them.

Have you ever noticed how much ice they manage to get into them. It never seems to leave much room for the actual beverage. A mini bar fridge is an absolute necessity when you are a regular at any sports events.

In all the stores you will find that standard cooler, usually in blue because it is a cold color. But surely you would prefer the club one with its emblem and in the right colors wouldn’t you. Putting stickers on an ordinary one just does not work as well. They always work themselves loose and start to look really tacky.

Sure you will pay a bit more for the one sold in the shop at the stadium but that extra money is going to a good cause after all. The club will get more money to invest in players to make them better. And, you know what, the drinks taste so much better too. Remember all the money you are not giving to those vans too.

One word of warning though, you will find that you have plenty of friends all wanting to come and join your party.

Of course they are not only good for sport, lots of students off to college would love to have one for their dorm. Again they can be bought in the colors of the educational establishment just to do a bit of bonding.

They will be safer relaxing in their rooms wi8th their mates than going out on the town every night. However small the room might be, they will always be able to fit one of these in.

Going camping is another situation where they are used a lot. Take one on your next picnic trip and it will provide you with nice cold liquid refreshments whenever and wherever you feel the need.

I’m sure that you will be able to come with lots of ideas yourself for using your portable fridge.

If they are the type that you carry around with you, you can get them designed in the colors of your favorite football team. Others can be made in the shape of a bottle of cola, beer or other related items. It seems amazing what ideas the manufacturers come up with.

For indoor use only you willl want to get a bar fridge which blends in with the decor of your existing bar.

Lots of people like the idea of having their own bar at home. I was no exception, I had been considering getting one fitted for a long time. When we decided that we could afford it of course we had to get a trendy bar refrigerator to finish it off nicely.

It just would not have been the same putting an ordinary fridge in there and then to discover the wife had filled it with food.

My portable refrigerator is for drinks only and it is staying that way.

I decided on a portable version so that we could take it with us when we went on a picnic or for a bit of camping. It is so good to grab a cold can of beer to help relax in the evening of a very hot day.

When we are in the car we can actually plug it into the cigarette lighter socket so the drinks do not warm up on the journey. We can just stop anywhere we like and get the drinks out although we do not have the alcoholic variety before driving. That would be very dangerous.

On rare occasions I have been known to take the mini fridge to the office with me if I knew that I would be working late.

College students also find these useful to keep their drinks cooler as they are a very compact refrigerator and fit nicely into a small dorm room.

Kitchen items are not the kind of things we buy regularly and yet they do introduce a new series a lot. We had an existing undercounter bar fridge but it was a bit erratic and it was time for it to be replaced.

Then we thought that our old toaster was burning the bread as well. It sent out too much smoke and used to kick the toast half way across the room sometimes. Unfortunately we then thought about other things that could get updated.

Our electricity bill had been a bit high lately. Maybe the out of date kitchen accessories were not helping in that respect.

Maybe the whole kitchen needs remodeling, it is amazing what thinking about a new beer fridge can lead to. Now by nature we are a bit careful with our spending and there would have to be a limit somewhere. Have a look around your kitchen some day when you are in a thinking mood.

Maybe a new work top counter, extra glass cabinets and some nice doors out onto the patio would be nice. But what good is having a beautiful modern kitchen if the appliances are old and broken. Better get them sorted out before we embark on the really expensive stuff.

So off we went to the local shopping center to have a look at what the stores had on offer. We had not been in an electrical product shop for a long time and were astonsihed at how technology has evolved.

All the gadgets seem to be more like a computer than a toaster these days. There are so many things that we can do with them.

I guess I am a bit old-fashioned in that I want a toaster that just toasts bread.

Eventually we got around to looking at the commercial refrigerators section. I discovered fridges that could actually make ice in their own freezers with a glass door.

Apparently they have been available for a long time according to the store assistant.

They have water filters and cooler incorporated in them as well and are all built to be green and eco friendly and use as little energy as possible.

That has got to help with our electric costs.

We actually asked the clerk if they were turned on as they were so quiet. We had been used to a noise akin to an earthquake coming from our old fridge in our back bar.

We decided to take things slowly and just get things one at a time but which one first.

Luckily we discovered that there was a sale on and we were able to get a discount basic toaster at an affordable price.

That allowed us to go back and splash out a bit and probably spent more than we should have done on the bar refrigerator – but it was well worthwhile.

It is essential because good wines do need to mature for a long time to bring out their true taste.  You should always set the temperature gauge at between 50 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit.  Doing this will aid greatly in the maturing process.

In the past before refrigerators came into common use, wine bottles were stored underground in caves or a cellar.  All big houses had their own wine cellars in fact.

How much easier it is nowadays to maintain the required temperature with fridges.  Refrigeration has made it a lot more convenient.

Scientists have recently discovered that there a number of chemical reactions that take place in the ageing process of wine.  There actually can be good reactions or bad reactions.  It is the temperature which determines whether it will help the wine or harm it.

If it is stored too hot or too cold, the reactions needed to have the best effect will not be able to happen.  Although the vine needs a lot of direct sunlight in its growing process, once bottled this same sun will damage the texture and flavour of the wine.

You can normally spot when this has happened as the oxidation it causes will make the wine darken in color.  If that does happen you might as well throw it away as you would not enjoy the drinking experience.  It certainly would not be allowed to be sold in the shops.
You therefore need wine refrigerators to keep the wine cooler just before you are ready to drink it.

The effect of long term storing in too cold a location will probably make the ageing process slower.  It is less likely to make the wine undrinkable but is still not the best way to do it.

When you get your corkscrew out and open the bottle it should be kept in a refrigerator where the average temperature is about 40 degrees F.  Personally I never get to that stage, it all seems to get drunk pretty soon after opened.

This temperature is too cold to store bottles before they are opened though so don’t keep wine fridges as a method of long term wine storage.

You do not have to be a wine enthusiast to enjoy the pleasure of drinking wine wine.  All you have to do is to make sure that you have a good wine fridge and use it in the correct way.

It seems to work a bit like a dog show where you have different breeds, then best of breed and then best of the show. It has another similarity in that it must be very subjective as to which is best. After all, what I like you may not like and vice versa.

The first level of judging is in the style of beer section. There were 54 different style awards. A number of them were common ones which I recognise like standard pale ale, strong pale ale, standard lager and premium lager but some which caught my eyes are the flavoured specialities such as coffee beer and chocolate beer. Sometimes we have a cup of coffee after our beer but I never imagined that they would flavor beer like that.

There are then sixteen categories and those are whittled down to the five main awards which are:

World’s Best Lager
World’s Best Ale
World’s Best Stout/Porter
World’s Best Wheat Beer
World’s Best Specialty Beer
The awards were dominated by the European countries who won all five of these major groups. I am not sure whether this is because European beer is really the best or just because it is where it is held and there are not as many entrants from overseas countries.

Waldhaus Diplom Pils from Germany won the best lager award and also won the best premium and best pilsner categories. The World’s Best Ale was won by the English barley wine style, strong dark ale category of Robinson’s Old Tom.

The Russian Federation’s Baltika No6 Porter came top in the bock style in the strong lager category to win the overall best stout/porter award. The best wheat beer cam from Belgium and is the Brasserie du Bocq Blanche de Namur (now that does sound as much like a pedigree dog as a beer).

The English Dark Star Espresso which, as its name suggests, is flavoured with coffee, was the winner as the best specialty beer.

Well that was all very interesting. When I drift over to my beer chiller to get a cold can out, I shall think about them and wonder whether I will get to taste any of them and what might win next year.

So off I went to the internet to see what I could find out. I discovered that long before the birth of Christ, the Chinese were the first to make use of naturally formed ice which they cut up and the Egyptians were probably the first to make ice artificially rather than the type that just freezes on a cold night. However I do not think that we can call either a refrigerator.

There are a number of reports of the collection of snow and ice in the winter months, either locally or actually going up mountains to collect it, and then storing it to be used in the summer.

The first person to make a machine that was made specifically designed to freeze water is generally recognized as William Cullen in the 1740s. He was a chemistry and physics teacher and lecturer in Scotland and used a pump to freeze water in a vacuum as an academic exercise to prove a theory. He did not seem to see any real commercial use for it at all.

In the very early years of the 19th century The American, Oliver Evans was the first person to draw up some plans which are acknowledged as being a primitive fridge but the plans were never turned into an actual machine.

Nothing serious then happened until 1834 when Jacob Perkins, who was a renowned inventor at the time, and used Evans’ ideas to obtain the first patent and build what can be best described as an ice making machine.

It was John Gorrie in the middle of the 19th century who made the first machine that we can say is like the modern refrigerator. He first made it to enhance his work in the medical field to assist in the relief and cure of tropical diseases. He stopped being a physician as he saw the commercial potential of his machine to make ice but he was never able to get the funding that he needed.

In the last 20 years of the 19th century, Carl von Linde was the leader in the field of refrigeration. He developed several methods of liquifying gasses which could then be used in to cool the air. Despite all his efforts though, this was not a very safe way to do it.

The 1920s saw the invention of Freon which is a compound that is a lot safer and less toxic than von Linde’s gasses. These became known as CFCs and were used from that time until very recently when they were recognized as causing harm to the ozone layer.

All very interesting but I think that I will get back to my beer fridge now.  I am ready for another.

So off I went to search for a solution and found out that there is a wide choice of a mini bar fridge on the market at present. There is so much of a choice that I thought I would try to help other people make up their minds which type to get.

Who do you want it for?

If you want one for the children, you can get something that will just hold half a dozen cans of soft drink and put it in their play room. That should be big enough to keep them happy.

If you are a big beer drinker and like to invite your friends over to watch the match, you can get a beer chiller style refrigerator which will hold as many cans as you think you might need. They can hold up to eighty cans and I think that that is plenty big enough for anything I might need.

You can get one which is ideal for dinner parties. This will be right for bottles of wine and some have the facility to keep the white wine and the red wine in separate compartments and at different temperatures. You can get one just to keep that one special bottle cold or they are also made for up to about 40 bottles so you can have a very happy evening.

Where do you want to use it?

Do you want it just to use at home or is it something you want to take out on picnics or the like? Some of them actually have wheels on the bottom to make it easier to move around. Put a portable mini fridge in the trunk of the car with a few cans in it and they will be nice and chilled when you are ready to drink them.

Remember that some places will not let you take something as big as this is to the venue. Often this applies at sports stadiums as too many beers can make the crowd restless.

All this talk of beer is making me feel quite thirsty so I am off to get a cold one out of my mini bar fridge and quench my thirst.

This little refrigerator comes in very handy if you have a garage or work room where you are lots of the time and do not like to keep going back to the kitchen.    It is very handy to just open it up and get out a nice cold one when I have been working hard on a hot day.      It is a dood idea to have one in the children’s play room solely for soft drinks or in the office for more serious celebrating.  Oh yes, you can also have one in the bar.

They come in various shapes and sizes.    The ones for your children normally hold just a few cans.

Then, perfect in the summer, is a beer fridge as very few people like drinking warm beer.

You can get a speciality wine fridge which serves the purpose of a wine cellar.    It is possible to get a portable mini fridge for carrying some drinks around with you perhaps for a picnic or to the ball game or something similar.

They are perfect for use as a beer chiller.    To give you some idea as to how much you can store in them, one of the most popular has a capacity of 70.8 litre or 2.5 cu ft.

You can keep four wine bottles and around 80 cans in this.

If you need something a bit smaller, possibly for the children’s area, the Koolatron Coca Cola Personal Mini Fridge is four liters and is large enough for only 6 cans at 355 ml.    At one a lot bigger, the Wine Enthusiast Wine Cellar can hold a maximum of 48 bottles of wine.  There are 2 containers so that you can keep one for the reds and the other for the whites.

They can be kept at different temperatures.    A relatively new but popular idea is a bar fridge shaped like a can with the colors of your favorite sports team painted on the outside.

They have stong casters underneath so that they can be wheeled around easily and you can normally put in around 88 12 oz cans.    One place that you will normally find a bar fridge is in a hotel or motel room or even in a common area there.

Most bedrooms in hotels have a mini fridge that has quite a little capacity.    Of course it does cost you extra for anything that you drink from one.    You can hire bar fridges for special occasions as well as buying one.    If you are having a special party and cannot afford the extra cost of buying a bar fridge which you might never use again, then consider hiring one.