Category: Brewing Equipment
Brewery Equipment explores all the equipment needed to produce quality craft beer throughout the brewing process including brewhouse, cellar, packaging, lab, quality control and more.
Expert Topic Brewery Floors – Flooring materials
Tile: A new aged tile floor is a great option. These are not your typical bathroom tiles. Most tiles in the industry these days are hexagon German tiles (many options) Although expensive to install, tile offers great service life and floor protection. A tile floor, properly installed using epoxy grouting should essentially never wear out, but will require periodic regrouting, especially around floor drain areas. The tile’s grout lines are where you will have issues and there are a lot of grout lines to keep track of. Some tile designs offer an engineered texture or slip resistant pattern cast into the ceramic. Homeowner-grade tiles are a nonstarter because they are light duty, slippery when wet, and can’t hold up to the severe loading, chemicals, and heat of the brewery environment.
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Expert Topic Brewery Floors – Drainage
Drainage Slope – Sloped Floors should be poured with a minimum slope of at least 1/4 inch per foot drop to the drains. This will assure thorough drainage of the floor. During the design phase, laying out the tanks and equipment placements is recommended to determine the optimum positioning of floor drains and drainage slope, always plan ahead for future expansion and growth.
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Expert Topic Brewery Floors Introduction
Brewery floors often rank pretty low on the expenditure list when setting up a brewery. To the uninformed, a floor is a floor, but to those who have lived and struggled with the additional expense and workload brought on by a bad floor, creating a good brewery floor system is, to put it simply, setting up your business on a good foundation.
Concrete is very porous and will eventually break down if left unprotected from the elements, chemicals, and pressures of a busy growing brewery. Good coatings and companies can be very hard to find, but it’s worth the extra effort to do a little homework and seek out an experienced concrete and coating provider that knows the ins and outs and dos and don’ts for a brewery environment.
Contents
Introduction
New Brew Floor
Drainage
Flooring Materials
Maintenance & Repair
Brewery Floor Q&A
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Expert Topic Malt storage
Storage of malt on-site:
Malt has a low moisture content of around 3.5% – 5% and is therefore a relatively stable product. Typically regular 2-row malt can last 4 to 6 month (or even longer), darker malts or caramel malts are more sensitive especially as far as aroma thereof is concerned. The shelf life for the latter malts should be less than 3 months between 6 – 8 weeks would be optimal. In general malt needs to be stored dry without the possibility of moisture or water uptake; additional aeration, particular cooling or heating for malt (storage) should not be necessary.
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Expert Topic Malt handling introduction
Every brewery should have a plan for what they’d like their malt handling flow to look like. There are many aspects to consider and a perfect solution isn’t always easy to come by. Malt handling and all that it entails is often times underestimated and often problems arise due to lack of proper planning and consideration. It is in the best interest of a brewery to find an optimal solution for their malt handling needs.
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Expert Topic Turnkey – Miscellaneous equipment
Pumps – A portable centrifugal pump is needed for the cleaning tanks. It can also be used to transfer the beer from one tank to another, or to turn a brew over on itself in situations such as dry hopping. Two portable pumps are much better than just one. And ask for spare seals.
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Expert Topic Turnkey – System Installation
Installation assistance and customer support are critical components of a turnkey purchase. Installation assistance can vary greatly in scope. Make sure you understand, preferably in writing, what the seller plans to offer in assistance. What is the additional fee, and what will you need to reach out for additional outside help to accomplish. The list can be a short as a few electrical and plumbing needs. On systems larger than 20-bbl, many suppliers send a representative or team out to make sure the brewhouse is put together correctly and functionally. It’s not uncommon for a representative to expect a labor force to be provided to work under their supervision. This is an important area to go over closely with the supplier of a turnkey system to prevent as many expensive surprises as possible.
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Expert Topic Turnkey – Hot side
Hot Water Source – A lot of hot water is needed to make beer. 170 degree water is much hotter than what comes out of your home hot water heater and requires special considerations to be used safely. The water can be heated via electrical heating elements in small to medium systems but steam or occasionally direct flame is needed for larger volumes of water.
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Expert Topic Turnkey – Cold side
Fermenters – There are many choices regarding fermenters. They can be horizontal or vertical, dish or cone bottomed, jacketed or single wall. Doors can be on the top or on the side. The main requirements are that the tank can be safely cleaned and sterilized, that the tank be made of material that will not taint the beer, and that proper fermentation temperatures can be maintained. The most commonly accepted standard for craft breweries is an insulated vertical stainless steel tank with a cone bottom, a manhole on the side, glycol cooling jackets on both the cone and sides, CIP attachments, and an adjustable racking port. The cone bottoms allow for the efficient removal of yeast from the beer after fermentation. The glycol jackets and insulation make it possible to install the tanks almost anywhere.
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Expert Topic Electric Brewing – The other heat source
When planning a brew system, the big decision used to be direct fire or steam. But, for brewers with systems up to 10 barrels, there is a third viable option for firing a brewhouse. Increasingly, brewers are using electric elements to heat their strike, sparge water, and boil their wort.
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Expert Topic Nano Brewery Equipment Introduction
Today’s prospective nano brewer has more options than ever before when it comes to equipment. Whether the increase in the number of companies making nano-sized equipment has grown as a result of the nano boom, or whether the availability of equipment has fueled the growth spurt is a chicken-and-egg question. Regardless, you will have plenty of choices no matter what size system you choose.
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Expert Topic Nano Brewery Basics
The term “nano brewery” may be a fairly recent addition to the craft brewing lexicon, but the concept of small breweries with a pint-sized brew length is nothing new. Although Anchor Brewing in San Francisco might be considered the first American craft brewery, it was New Albion Brewing of Sonoma, Calif., that showed other entrepreneurs they could build a brewery from the ground up. New Albion opened in 1976 using a 55-gallon brewing system.
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Expert Topic Types of pumps
Despite what all the engineers and pump salesmen will tell you, there really are only two types of pumps; centrifugal and positive displacement. Understand the difference between these two and you are well on your way to understanding pumps. The difference is that centrifugal pumps spins at a high speed and transfers centrifugal or kinetic energy into the liquid in the form of velocity and pressure. The positive displacement pump, on the other hand, transfers a precise measured amount of liquid from the inlet to the outlet for each rotation or stroke of the pump. Let’s look at each.
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Expert Topic Sizing your pump
Once you have selected your pump type you have to select the right size. Pick too small a pump and the problems will be obvious but picking too big a pump can be just as bad. Not only are you wasting your money on an unnecessarily expensive pump, but it can beat up your beer. After all the pump wants to move stuff around and if your pump is too big for your lines, it will cavitate and damage your beer, your pump and your lines and…
So to size your pump you need to figure out a few basic things:
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