If you’re renovating your kitchen, adding a bar or entertaining space, or creating a butler’s pantry, one appliance you may be considering is a beverage center. They’ve become more and more popular in recent years, partly due to their inclusion in so many home renovation shows.
Although a feature of a typical higher-end renovation, it’s an aspirational appliance for a lot of people. I say this from my own experience, as my wife and I have loved to watch home renovation shows on HGTV for years.
Every time we would see one where a beverage center was a part of the show’s home reno project, I would turn to my wife and say “why don’t we have a beverage center?” It became a running joke, but it wasn’t really something we were considering until we decided to renovate a little sunroom off of our kitchen into more of a butler’s pantry. Jackpot! We suddenly had a logical place for a beverage center.
When we were in the process of picking a beverage center, I wrote an article about some of the best options on the market in 2021. That was really based on my own research in finding the right option for our house.
Well, we completed that renovation last year and I realized I had never written a full review of the beverage center we ended up buying. So, check out our 6-month(ish) later review of the Zephyr Single Zone Beverage Cooler.
Zephyr
This brand is a fairly high-end (but not ridiculous) home appliance manufacturer, focused on wine and beverage coolers and range hoods. The fact that they don’t venture beyond these core product lines helps them focus on quality and their products are highly reviewed.
The Single Zone Beverage Cooler
Among the many beverage cooler options, we went with the Single Zone Beverage Cooler for our renovation.
Features
- 24” size
- Built-in or freestanding (as the sides are stainless steel as well)
- Capacity: 7 bottles, 112 12oz cans.
- 5.6 cubic feet
- Adjustable glass shelves
- Slide-out wood wine shelf
- 3-Color LED lighting
- Stainless steel
- Door Open Alarm
- Carbon filter air filtration
- Active cooling technology
- Easy to use temperature controls
What We Like About it
To date, the fridge has worked flawlessly. Internal temperature stays very stable and it’s easy to keep the contents chilled, despite the fridge being in direct sunlight for a good portion of the day.
The multi-colored lighting is a very nice to have feature. It works like a nightlight in the room since the door is glass. You can also choose between three colors (white, blue, and amber) — looks cool. Silly, but true.
The door feels nice and solid. One thing we noticed with some other options was the units felt flimsy. These really felt lightweight and just not very solid. This is not an issue with the Zephyr. You get a nice solid feeling when it closes.
The adjustable shelves make it easy to shift them around and pick the configuration that works best for your use case. We tend to keep a few bottles of wine on the wine rack (which is great) and then a mix of energy drinks, sodas, juices, bottled water, and other adult beverages in the rest of the fridge. After trying a couple of different layouts, we found one that works really well for us.
What We Don’t Like
Not much really. It does occasionally get a bit of a vibration, but we’ve been able to shift it slightly and the vibration goes away. That has happened 1-2 times in 6 months.
The door hinge definitely doesn’t close itself. That’s pretty common on beverage coolers, but for folks who get used to having a fridge that closes itself, this could be something to get used to. So, not really an issue, as much as something to get used to.
That’s honestly about it for negative things.
The Verdict
It’s a big thumbs up from us. The fridge has done everything we expected from a performance standpoint. Not a single issue with it in 6 months. Although were many less expensive options, we went with a slightly pricier option, looking for higher quality and dependability. After six months in, we feel like we made exactly the right choice.
