outdoor cooler

I was thinking of building a beer cooler for my deck but would like to use my zone 4 climate to my advantage. I'm going to use some form of water sawdust (pykrete) mix. Does anyone have any experience building this type of structure...I know there was a cooler built by a uvm professor but it's very large. I will place it on my north side of my house that receives no sun in the summer.

Some friends took one similar to this to Burning Man.
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/readers-solutions/electricity-free-terracotta-fridge

Location? (consider adding your location to your profile)

Zone 4 US may be too humid for that terra cota thing to cool enough unless you like luke warm beer.

If you're going with pykrete, you might think about freezing it in blocks and storing them in an ice house. Just bring out as you need and place in a normal cooler. That way you would have more choice as to where/when you use it and it might last longer into the warm season. If you were to construct the cooler from only pykrete, I would worry about the thing getting misshapen as it would melt faster in some places vs others. Plus there is the problem of fishing beers out of the sawdust/melt water mixture.