Call me old school, but I have always used an apartment-size refrigerator as a multi-purpose brewing refrigerator. An apartment size (10 to 14cu. ft) refrigerator is big enough to hold at least two soda kegs with picnic taps while providing me with space to store blank media, my culture collectidon, and sterile starter media in refrigerator section. I store hops and dried yeast in the freezer section. My old brewing refrigerator was a 10cu. ft. Samsung non-frost free unit. That went with my old brewery, so I am now looking at a Whirlpool 11.6 cu. ft. Top Freezer Refrigerator.
In a day and age where people are using freezers as keezers and have dedicated chillers for fermentation, I wonder what people are using to store their hops and yeast. What happened to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) approach to amateur brewing? Did it go away after non-engineers dominated what used to be primarily an engineer's (or at least STEM graduates) hobby in the United States? If anyone doubts that this hobby used to be dominated by engineering types, all he/she only needs to look at the pioneers. Charlie P. was a nuclear engineer. John Palmer was a metallurgical engineer. I was and still am a computer scientist and engineer (BS and MS degrees in computer science and engineering). Early brewing was like a mad monks squad of offbeat engineering types (maybe, offbeat was a little too kind). It was a geek hobby that few people understood. My only guess as to why engineering types dominated amateur brewing in the early days is that it required engineer's ability to build things that people want using things one can get. Sure, there were non-engineers, but they were creative enough to build their own stuff.