Hands-on with the Tap King: is this the king of beer at home?

The answer to the question of is this as good as a pub is harder for me to answer since I’m relatively new to this whole beer drinking thing.

However, everyone in the office who could try it offered an opinion, and unanimously, the answer was no.

Two beers. The one on the left is from the bottle. The one on the right is from the Tap King. Guess which was always preferred.

Over group testing, what we found was that while the beer from the tap wasn’t bad, the lack of fizz and carbonation on your tongue was seriously noticeable.

“It lacks body,” said Peter Blasina, tasting it over a lunch, and when compared to a bottle of the same beer poured into a glass, immediately preferred the bottled brew.

Our designer Bill Chan also preferred the pre-packaged bottle, saying that the keg almost tasted flat, and barely had enough bubbles to constitute a fresh beer.

Playing with the bottles, this problem might stem from the CO2 bottle inside the tank being too small for the purpose, and not enough carbonation injected at the time the beer is pulled.

From a design point of view, the all plastic Tap King does come off as cheap, with a plastic body and flimsy feeling, and in some ways reminds us more of a marketing stunt and gimmick than an actual encapsulated brewery for your home, which is sort of what we had hoped it would be.

That said, it’s also around $32, so it doesn’t exactly come with the premium that coffee pod machines come with, making it a very different beast altogether.

The first beer you pull may have a lot of head.

Price wise, the Tap King will cost you more to run than buying cans or bottles, and will provide even less.

Comparing the same beer we were testing (James Boag’s Premium Lager), a 24 pack of 375ml bottles not only offers more beer, but costs around $45, not the $48 for two 3.2L Tap-King bottles that only offer 20 drinks.

If you can find cans, they’re generally cheaper and offer more per box, so these hardly compare.

Which would you pick?

Outside of price, the real question is over whether the quality matches the product. Most people in our office don’t believe that to be the case, but can see why it would be fun to keep a keg in your fridge.

As such, Lion’s Tap King is closer to a marketing stunt than an actual product you’ll keep using.

You might get more than the two or four time use here, but we suspect outside of a party or barbecue, you’ll go back to bottles soon enough.