Birallee Beer & Brewing: Metal Pegboard for Garage Homebrewery

In this latest post we wanted to give a quick update on the latest addition to our garage homebrewery - our metal pegboard.

Why a Metal Pegboard?

We're certainly not the first to come up with this idea to hang a pegboard on the wall of our garage, it's pretty much what these products are made for, but we did want to share this to help give some ideas to others on how they can potentially improve their homebrewery workspace - we certainly feel it's made a big difference for ours.

For the uninitiated, pegboards are panels of timber or metal with evenly spaced holes that hooks or other accessories are placed into that can then be used to store or hang tools, shelves, or basically anything else you may need in your workspace.

From a homebrewing perspective, this could be clamps, hoses, gaskets, stirrers, recirculation pipes, thermometers or the countless other accessories that you'll have laying around the brewery.

Metal vs Timber Pegboards

We opted for a metal pegboard over timber as they're stronger, and more resistance to wear and tear, and in particular moisture, and can support heavier tools and equipment without warping or cracking over time. It also get's very hot (and very cold) in our garage throughout the year, so metal just seemed like a better choice for overall longevity. The black powder coated finish looks pretty nice too.

Timber pegboards are of course cheaper, but we'd recommend paying that little bit more for metal if you're able to.

Which Pegboard

We went for the Pinnacle 900 x 450mm metal pegboard that we were able to get from our local Bunnings. We purchased two of them and mounted them side by side to give a 900 x 900mm usable pegboard space which gives plenty of space for hanging everything we've needed to (so far).

Pinnacle metal pegboard as advertised on the Bunnings website

Mounting

Each metal pegboard has four (4) mounting holes, one on each of the corners. So we didn't have to worry about hanging too much weight on the boards, we mounted both of them onto a single piece of 900 x 900mm MDF (which we spray painted black to help it blend in) which was then mounted to the wall.

Metal pegboard just after being installed on the garage wall

This meant we could ensure the MDF was fixed into timber studs of the garage wall first before hanging each pegboard panel from 4 screws protruding slightly from the MDF sheet. Otherwise, if the pegboard was mounted directly onto screws on the garage wall, the spacing wouldn't have lined up and allowed us to ensure all 4 were going into a timber stud.

One other benefit of a metal pegboard like this is that the front face is offset, so there is a void behind it to allow the hooks to travel through. Timber pegboards are usually a solid, flat sheet of timber and need some kind of spacer to be installed behind them to ensure there is a gap behind the board for the hooks.

The manufacturer (Pinnacle) have a handy video with some tips on mounting their pegboards in this Youtube video.

Pegboard Hole Spacing

When buying hooks and accessories for your pegboard, you'll need to know the spacing of the holes (as some hooks attach via multiple holes) to ensure the ones you buy will fit in your pegboard. The Pinnacle pegboard has a hole spacing of 25mm which appears to be the most common spacing configuration for pegboards so finding compatible hooks wasn't a problem for us.

Pegboard Hooks & Accessories

Now the fun part, buying all your hooks and accessories to hang your bits and pieces. We ended up going with generic/cheap hooks from Bunnings, as opposed to the nice, black powder coated ones that were significantly more expensive. We got a variety of different size and length hooks, a mount to allow for some plastic totes, as well as a small metal shelf.

Pegboard just after installation in the garage

In most cases we only had one thing hanging off each hook, with the exception of the tri clamps, so long hooks weren't really required in our case.

Pegboard Hole Size

What we soon discovered however, is the diameter of the hook pieces was much smaller than the pegboard holes which meant the hooks moved around when fitted to the pegboard, so they were prone to falling out when disturbed - especially when taking things off the hooks if you weren't careful.

We didn't want to deal with hooks falling out all the time, and after a bit of research we discovered you can buy some rubber bungs/grommets for just this purpose that help secure the hooks in place.

This is taken from the Amazon ad for the grommets we bought

We bought a bunch of them from Amazon for next to nothing and they worked an absolute treat - as you can see in the image below.

Hook fastened to pegboard with rubber grommet

Insert the bung into the pegboard, then mount the hook into the centre hole of the grommet which makes for a much tighter fit and holds the hooks securely in place. Obviously plenty of other people have experienced this exact problem and we're glad these were so easy to get!

The End Result

Here's how the pegboard looks in it's current state. What we love about a setup like this is that we can chop and change it quite easily whenever we need to. Unlike fixing brackets or shelves to the wall, the pegboard gives ultimate flexibility, so we very much anticipate that this will evolve and change over time along with everything else in our homebrewery.