Tap Trail’s affinity for gadgets has brought you a long line of cool beer geeky things that are either potentially useless, or, if you’re lucky, might even be a value added to your craft beer affinities. We’ve introduced you to a number of cool growlers over the past couple years. Including the poorly named ManCan. We’ve even discussed the growth of growlers and where we see them headed in the future. So we’ve got your growler needs covered here.

The U Keg is another growler, but it is not only better named than the ManCan, it looks like it has a better design. The product is made in Oregon by GrowlerWerks. I haven’t bought one. At first glance in videos and on sites, it actually looks poorly built. Sort of like a steampunk montage gone wrong, or how like it was designed in some high school metal works class. There’s some brass in there. Some stainless steel. The spout and tap gear looks like it was thrown on there. The handle looks a little wonky.

But I’ve read lots of reviews of this, not to mention it raised $1.55 million on Kickstarter. People seem to be very happy with it. It took 1 year from funding for Kickstarter supporters to get the U Keg, starting around January 2016.

The U Keg has multiple sizes, but the most popular is the 64oz. The beer is kept carbonated by a standard CO2 cartridge placed into a cap on the growler. The beer is kept cool AND pressurized. You can regulate the C02 with a simple dial located at it’s base. The U Keg was designed by a MIT and U Berkeley graduates. You can watch them describe the design process in the below video. All of that highend design went into a high end price too. The standard 64oz stainless steel version costs a hefty $139 on the low end and gets as high as $229 for the Copper Plated 128oz U Keg. You can buy directly from the GrowlerWerks site OR you can head to Paste Magazine and enter to win one for free…

According to Beer Geek Gamer’s 22minute review, the thing works pretty good, but he seems kinda reluctant to give them the props. Watch the video below to see how to use it.