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Pour Anywhere, Party Everywhere: Win a $1,000+ Cooler Keg + New Trail Prize Pack
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Graphic courtesy of Derek Campos, Senior Graphic Designer, Next Glass
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What happens when you team up with one of the coolest innovations in beer and one of the most outdoor-focused breweries in the country? You get the summer’s best giveaway, offering more than $1,000 in summer beer gear from our friends at The Cooler Keg and New Trail Brewing.
Essentially an ultra-portable stainless steel cooler and CO₂-driven draft system that lets you bring the bar with you, the Cooler Keg isn’t limited to just beer; it handles cider, hard seltzers, cocktails, mocktails, soda, and more.
Win one of these Cooler Kegs, which we recommend filling with New Trail’s flagship hazy Broken Heels, for the ultimate summer move. Plus, $100 in gear from New Trail to complement your next day outdoors.
Wherever your adventures take you this summer, make sure your best bevvies can come along.
Looking to learn more, including how to enter? Well, read on, my friend…
The Coolest New Invention in Craft Beer
Photography courtesy of Cooler Keg
Picture this: You’re splashing around in the lake with your friends on a hot summer day, having the time of your life. The only problem on this perfect day? Every time you need a new beer, you have to swim over to the dock and get out to run to the cooler to grab a can. But what if you could pour yourself a draft beer right in the middle of the lake?
That’s the question a friend asked Anthony Bernas, co-founder of Cooler Keg.
A fifteen-year homebrewer, former ER nurse, and, quite frankly, expert tinkerer with his hands, Bernas accepted this challenge head-on.
Bernas and his partner and co-founder, Racine Gruberman, had been going with friends to Gruberman’s parents’ cabin for years. Each time, they’d try to outdo the party from the year before.
One year, they got a float designed for picnic coolers so they didn’t have to keep making beer runs to the garage fridge. Another, they brought a twelve-foot inflatable ring with a bull in the middle.
“We just had everything we could think of to make floating in the lake amazing,” says Bernas.
Everything except something on the go to pour beer at its freshest—beer on draft.
Over the next year, Bernas assembled a Cooler Keg prototype using PVC pipes from Home Depot, shower drain parts, and a paintball tank.
When it debuted, Bernas’ friends told him, “Dude, do you realize what you just made!?”
Photography courtesy of Cooler Keg
Essentially a portable kegerator that doesn’t require refrigeration or electricity, the Cooler Keg is a draft system built into a stainless steel picnic cooler. All you need to do is fill the cooler with ice packs or bags of ice, pop open one of the wide-mouth mini kegs inside (essentially a pressurized growler), fill it with the beverage of your choice, close the lid, and you’re all set.
“Everything quickly connects,” points out Bernas. “You take out the draft tower, attach it with a twist, no tools needed; the draft lines attach to the other two posts, and you’re good to go.”
And you can put whatever you want in it—beer, margaritas, wine, mixed drinks, cocktails, lemonade—you name it.
“The kegs don’t care,” says Bernas. “You can fill them up with anything.”
In total, the Cooler Keg can hold seven growlers (basically thirty-six 12oz cans) worth of beer or ninety 5oz drinks.
Photography courtesy of Cooler Keg
“The whole thing is powered by CO₂, just like a tap room, just like a bar,” says Bernas. “Our draft system is no different than any professional setup.”
Except that it’s small enough that you can take it to the middle of the lake.
“Anywhere a picnic cooler can go,” says Bernas, who has taken his to the Grand Canyon, to the beach, to tailgating, and with him over ten thousand miles and across twenty-seven states.
Officially launched in January 2024, Cooler Keg raised around $208,000 through a successful crowdfunding campaign, driven in part by a TikTok video of Bernas in his Chicago basement filling the Cooler Keg with PBR and Stella Artois for a party. The video went viral, garnering around 2.3 million views.
And for good reason. Why hasn’t someone invented this before!?
With the Cooler Keg, gone are the clunky jockey boxes of yore; no longer do you need to worry about leaving the fun to make beer runs, and you can put an end to staying behind the bar all night making drinks.
“It’s in the cooler ready to go,” says Bernas. “If you want some, go pour yourself some.”
Or as Bernas simply puts it, “This is just a better way to party!”
The Best Beer to Put in the Coolest Invention in Craft Beer
Photography courtesy of New Trail Brewing
A brewery built for the outdoors, New Trail is the perfect beer to take with you wherever you bring your Cooler Keg.
It’s right in the name. “We don’t want to be the old trail,” laughs New Trail Brewing Marketing Director Don Rieck. “[New Trail] is about finding your new path.”
Initially started by Dave Hertwig, Charles Imbro, and Tony Ecker, New Trail is more than a brewery; it’s an outdoor recreation brand. The co-founders wanted to “make beers that they wanted to drink while doing the things they love to do,” says Rieck.
The Williamsport, PA-based brewery makes beers geared specifically for anything you do under the sun, literally. “The beers we craft are meant to be your sidekicks when you go out and do whatever it is you like to do,” says Rieck. “That might be hanging out in the backyard with a bunch of friends around a fire pit, rock climbing, something really extreme, and everything in between.”
He continues. “These beers are meant to ride along with you and be perfect complements to your adventure.”
For instance, skiing, running, gravel cycling, and fishing, among others. “We wanted to create great beer and draw people to visit us, drink beer, and use the area around us,” says Rieck, describing Williamsport as “a city, but we’re just five minutes from the middle of nowhere—undeveloped land.”
Photography courtesy of New Trail Brewing
For whatever adventure you plan, we highly recommend taking along New Trail’s Broken Heels. The flagship hazy came from New Trail Director of Brewing Operations Mike LaRosa, who brought some serious hop game with him from previous stints at Kane and Tired Hands.
“He was on the cutting edge of that hazy IPA thing when it popped up,” Rieck chuckles. “He came here and was like, we’re probably going to make hazy IPA pretty often.”
Initially, only planning to brew this beer every two or three months, LaRosa honed in on the recipe. “Even from the beginning, we wanted to make the best beer we could,” says Rieck, noting they still hold true to the original recipe today. “We made this really, really excellent beer.”
Packed with hand-selected Pacific Northwest Citra and Mosaic hops, Broken Heels drinks orange-forward, “maybe with a little bit of citrus rind and pine,” shares Rieck. The New England-style IPA finishes dry for a classic hazy that’s just damn delicious.
And we’re not the only ones who think so.
Broken Heels took off so quickly that New Trail now brews it up to seven days a week.
Named after an adventuring accident that left New Trail Co-Founder Imbro with two broken heels, the brewery’s first flagship “was a survival of the fittest,” says Rieck. “Everybody wanted that beer, and they wanted to drink that more than anything else we made.”
Rieck likes to take Broken Heels out on the Susquehanna River (the oldest in the world, he tells us) when he goes fishing. But he says he’s seen fans take this beer all the way to the Matterhorn, a mountain in the Swiss Alps.
Photography courtesy of New Trail Brewing
For something a little more sessionable, Rieck recommends New Trail’s flagship hazy session IPA called 24/7, which just launched in April.
“That beer is super unique,” says Rieck of the 4.72% ABV that’s hazy but with a more approachable alcohol content.
Magically, the lower alcohol level doesn’t mean New Trail sacrifices flavor or body.
The key?
A thiolized yeast strain that “turns the free thiols the hops are giving us into this really crazy over-the-top tropical citrus characteristic that really sets the beer apart from a lot of other sessions you can find,” says Rieck.
To complement the Cooler Keg, New Trail is giving away its own prize pack, including…
🍻 Cozy woven blanket
🍻 Broken Heels performance hat
🍻 Steel pint
🍻 Nalgene
WIN THE $1,000 PRIZE PACK HERE
How Do I Enter to Win!?
Photography courtesy of Cooler Keg (on the left) and New Trail (on the right). Graphics courtesy of Derek Campos, Senior Graphic Designer, Next Glass
This summer, we’re giving you the chance to take your adventures to the next level with the ultimate beer gear bundle. Whether you’re floating in the lake, camping in the mountains, or just grilling in your backyard, the Cooler Keg brings the draft experience anywhere you go—no power, no fuss, just fresh pours on demand. Paired with trail-ready gear from New Trail, like their flagship Broken Heels hat, steel pint, Nalgene, and cozy woven blanket, this $1,000+ prize pack is your ticket to better beers in better places.
Don’t miss your shot to win the coolest cooler in craft beer.
Enter now and let the good times pour.
This piece is written in partnership with our friends at Cooler Keg and New Trail.
About The Author
Grace Lee-Weitz
Currently Drinking:
Fort Point Beer Co. KSA
Grace is the Senior Content Editor for Hop Culture and Untappd. She also organizes and produces the largest weeklong women, femme-identifying, and non-binary folx in craft beer festival in the country, Beers With(out) Beards, and the first-ever festival celebrating the colorful, vibrant voices in the queer community in craft beer, Queer Beer. An avid craft beer nerd Grace always found a way to work with beer. After graduating with a journalism degree from Northwestern University, she attended culinary school before working in restaurant management. She moonlighted as a brand ambassador at 3 Sheeps Brewing Co. on the weekends before moving into the beer industry full-time as an account coordinator at 5 Rabbit Cerveceria. Grace holds her Masters degree in the Food Studies program at NYU.
