2 Door Bar Fridges

Two people serving at once, and roughly twice the bottles and cans within reach. Each bartender gets a bay of their own, so nobody is standing behind somebody else waiting for a door to shut.

It also changes how you restock. With two bays you can run one down and load the other between services, instead of emptying the only cabinet you have while the bar is open.

Glass if customers can see the cabinet. Seeing the bottles is what makes people order them, and staff can read the stock level across the bar without opening anything. The glass on these cabinets is double glazed, so running a glass door unit costs only marginally more than a solid one and the extra sales more than cover it.

Solid if the cabinet lives in a service well out of sight, or if the bar front has to look like the joinery around it. Williams offers the Boronia and Cameo two door cabinets both ways, so you can match the finish without changing brand.

They can, in a humid room or an outdoor bar on a wet night, which is why commercial glass door cabinets are double glazed and many are made with a heated or demisting glass panel. Check what a given unit has on its product page if the bar gets steamy.

Condensation on the outside of the glass is almost always a sign the room is humid rather than a fault in the fridge. Air movement over the doors fixes most of it. Water sitting on the inside of the glass is different, and usually points at a door that is not sealing or is being left open.

Black colorbond for a bar customers look at. It disappears into dark joinery and shows fingerprints far less than polished steel. Williams offers black on the Boronia, the Cameo and the Cameo Mini, in both glass and solid door versions.

Stainless steel for a bar that is already stainless, or where the cabinet sits alongside kitchen equipment. It wipes down with hot water and detergent and shrugs off trolleys and kegs without chipping the way a painted panel would. Both finishes cost you nothing in performance, so pick on how the bar looks.

Sliding doors for a narrow service well. They stay inside the footprint of the cabinet, so nothing swings into the path staff are walking, and the Atosa BB-208SEC is the two door sliding unit REO offers.

Swing doors everywhere else. They open the full bay in one movement, which is faster to serve and much faster to restock, and they seal against a single gasket run rather than a track. Sliding tracks collect bottle caps, dust and spilt drink and need cleaning out or the doors get stiff.

A back bar fridge is built for drinks. The shelving is set up for bottles and cans, the cabinet is shallow enough for bar joinery, and the front is finished because customers see it. The Williams Boronia and Cameo are back bar cabinets.

An under bench fridge is built to go under a kitchen bench and give you a stainless top to work on. The AG Equipment GNX2100TNG, the Atosa EPF3721 and the Skipio SGR15-2 are two door under bench units, and they suit a cafe or a coffee counter where the same cabinet has to store milk and act as bench space.

A glass door cabinet does that job well in a cafe, a bottle shop counter or a club, and Williams lists its remote Boronia cabinets as counter display refrigerators. Customers see the drinks, choose without asking, and the bar finds out what is selling by looking at the gaps.

If the fridge is going to be the main sales point for takeaway drinks, look at a purpose built drink fridge instead. Those are taller, hold far more and are made to be loaded from the front all day, whereas a bar fridge is built to fit under a counter.

White wine and sparkling, yes, provided the shelf height takes a 750ml bottle standing up or the shelves can be taken out. Check the shelf layout on the product page, because a cabinet set up for stubbies and cans may not have the clearance.

A bar fridge holds one temperature across the whole cabinet, so red wine served at cellar temperature and beer served cold cannot both come out of it. If the list is serious about wine, buy a dedicated wine cabinet with its own temperature band and leave the bar fridge for beer, mixers and soft drink.

Gaskets and hinges first, because two doors get opened twice as often as one and each opening pulls on the same few components. A gasket that has taken a set stops sealing and the cabinet runs all day trying to hold temperature. Both are wear and tear components that need to be replaced periodically.

After that it is the glass and the condenser. Sugar from spilt mixers dries onto the inside of the glass and onto the seal, and a condenser furred with dust and lint cannot shed heat, so the compressor runs flat out. Neither is a fault, and both are avoided with a wipe down and a fin clean on a schedule.

Check the unit for transit damage as soon as it arrives and tell us within 24 hours. Not two days, not two weeks. REO offers a 24-hour replacement guarantee on transit damage, and it only applies if you tell us inside that window.

Unwrap the cabinet before it goes into the bar joinery, not after, because a unit already built into a run is far harder to get at and far harder to swap. Look along both glass edges, the door frames and the corners of the carton, and photograph anything you find before the fridge is moved.

Best value for money is the one to buy, which means the longest warranty and the lowest total cost of ownership across the years you keep it, not the cheapest ticket. Gaskets, hinges, controllers and condenser fans are what you pay for later, so a longer warranty and a supplier who picks up the phone are worth more than a small saving now. Williams is the premium name here, and Thermaster and FED-X sit below it with warranty and after-sales support that are unbeatable for that price point.

For the funding, Silverchef Rent-Try-Buy lets a venue rent the cabinet rather than buy it outright. The rental payments are an operating expense, the cash stays available for the rest of the fit-out, and after a while trading you can buy the unit out or move up to a wider one.