New 'Commercial' 200l brewery

[dloper]

First brew last night. A Pale ale, using Challenger hops. 6KW in my 300 litre Celotex insulated kettle gives a very vigorous boil with 230 litres, with plenty of headspace. Only problem was the gale force winds blowing back down my vent and filling the brewery with clouds of steam.

[Aaron]

Glad to hear all's going to plan.

I'm interested in your fermentation logistics. You're fermenting in blue barrels right? So after fermentation is over, do you plan to pump the beer from FVs into your blue barrel secondaries which will already be in your cold room? Or do you have some sort of gravity drop system?

[dloper]

Glad to hear all's going to plan.

I'm interested in your fermentation logistics. You're fermenting in blue barrels right? So after fermentation is over, do you plan to pump the beer from FVs into your blue barrel secondaries which will already be in your cold room? Or do you have some sort of gravity drop system?

I'm fermenting in blue barrels on the same level as my secondary blue barrel bright tanks, so I'll be pumping from one to the other. I'd like to put the beer through a chiller on it's way to the cold room too, to save my freezer from working too hard and my friends at The Wentwell Brewery in Derby are helping me out with this aspect. After a spell in the secondary, I'll pump upwards to another blue barrel, to be used as a priming/bottling/casking vessel and use gravity to fill my bottles or casks. I'm using a Solar pump, running off a car battery, which pumps roughly 10 litres per minute. I really ought to invest in a spare pump though, as I'm depending on it. Another aspect that I've yet to sort out is the yards of food safe hosepipes which seem to clump together in some obscure mating ritual any time I leave them in close proximity. perhaps I ought to invest in some coloured tape, so I can match up the ends of these infernal, scalding, floor flooding serpents.

[dloper]

Pumped my first brew from the fermenter into the bright tank tonight. Rather fraught, as the pump turned the beer into froth! So, it took some time to transfer from one vessel to the other, waiting for the head to subside. At least I won't have to worry about oxygenation as the fizz will have displaced all the oxygen in the bright tank. A lesson learned - chill the beer before pumping it. No harm done though

[Fil]

Whats the headroom in the brewery like, could you hoist the FV up on a platform for gravity transfer?

[dloper]

I could, but 210 litres in a blue barrel is a difficult lift. I may raise the fermenter before filling it instead, and gravity fill the bright tank. I wonder if I'd still have the same problem pumping from there to the filling tank but perhaps the C02 levels would be lower after conditioning and the cold bright beer might help with pumping.

It's the first time I've used the new brewery plant, so I'd be surprised if I didn't have a few things to work out. As long as it doesn't affect the beer!

[Aaron]

I read a thread from a guy in the states - I think it was on the probrewer site - who fermented in blue barrels and had them on pallets. He used one of those pallet lifter contraptions to move them around. A nice simple solution I thought.

How was your efficiency with the big cooler? I expect it held temperature quite well.

[sladeywadey]

With all the pumping, how are you managing to keep oxygen away from the beer?

[darkonnis]

You could pump it sure enough, but you need the beer to be near freezing or you'll just be firing froth out the other end.
Those blue barrels should be air tight, you could try using CO2 to transfer it, just take it slow and gently and you should be able to get it to move over, might take a while though.

[dloper]

With all the pumping, how are you managing to keep oxygen away from the beer?

With the beer foaming as its pumped, I hope the bright tank quickly develops a blanket of CO2 and I can't see that pumping would introduce oxygen.

[dloper]

I read a thread from a guy in the states - I think it was on the probrewer site - who fermented in blue barrels and had them on pallets. He used one of those pallet lifter contraptions to move them around. A nice simple solution I thought.

How was your efficiency with the big cooler? I expect it held temperature quite well.

75 litres of liquor at 82 degrees in the kettle cooled to 79 degrees in the cool box mash tun, which is my strike temperature to mash at 68 degrees. After an hour and a half, the temperature was down to 66 degrees.

[dloper]

You could pump it sure enough, but you need the beer to be near freezing or you'll just be firing froth out the other end.
Those blue barrels should be air tight, you could try using CO2 to transfer it, just take it slow and gently and you should be able to get it to move over, might take a while though.

Good plan. Cheers.

[Aaron]

I read a thread from a guy in the states - I think it was on the probrewer site - who fermented in blue barrels and had them on pallets. He used one of those pallet lifter contraptions to move them around. A nice simple solution I thought.

How was your efficiency with the big cooler? I expect it held temperature quite well.

75 litres of liquor at 82 degrees in the kettle cooled to 79 degrees in the cool box mash tun, which is my strike temperature to mash at 68 degrees. After an hour and a half, the temperature was down to 66 degrees.

Do you think you could fit 40kg grain plus 100L liquor in the cool box or were you pretty maxed out at 75L? What size is the thread on the outlet and is it just plastic or does it have a metal thread inserted into the plastic? The reason I ask is because i'm in the process of setting up a 1BBL rig and looking at different options. Thanks in advance.

[dloper]

I read a thread from a guy in the states - I think it was on the probrewer site - who fermented in blue barrels and had them on pallets. He used one of those pallet lifter contraptions to move them around. A nice simple solution I thought.

How was your efficiency with the big cooler? I expect it held temperature quite well.

75 litres of liquor at 82 degrees in the kettle cooled to 79 degrees in the cool box mash tun, which is my strike temperature to mash at 68 degrees. After an hour and a half, the temperature was down to 66 degrees.

Do you think you could fit 40kg grain plus 100L liquor in the cool box or were you pretty maxed out at 75L? What size is the thread on the outlet and is it just plastic or does it have a metal thread inserted into the plastic? The reason I ask is because i'm in the process of setting up a 1BBL rig and looking at different options. Thanks in advance.

Mashing at 68 degrees, using my biggest grain bill of 33 Kg and 80 litres of liquor only leaves enough headspace to introduce enough liquor at 90 degrees after my mash period, to bring the mash up to 72 degrees, probably not high enough to denature the enzymes completely.

I'm not sure how to quote the fitting size on the outlet, but I used a 90 degree bend, from a standard UK washing machine fitting, to connect to the threaded plastic outlet.

[dloper]

7 brews in now, and with hindsight there are a couple of things I would have done differently. My kettle is too tall to easily clean the bottom - I should have made it wider and shallower - and the valve outlet, sitting about 25mm above the bottom leaves around 10 litres of wort in the kettle, plus whatever volume around 500 grams of hops absorbs. I'll add another valve, in the bottom of the kettle at some point.

My brew schedule works out as:

3 hours to heat 200 litres of liquor to 82 degrees C.

10 minutes to pump 75 litres into my mash tun.

15 minutes to add my grain bill and stabilise the temperature.

1.5 hours to mash, starting at 68-69 degrees C and finishing at 66 degrees C. Whilst mashing, I refill the kettle to 200 litres of liquor and 30 minutes before sparging, I pump most of the liquor, at around 85 degrees C, up to my HLT. The remainder goes into the mash tun, raising the mash temp to 72-74 degrees C. My sparge liquor comes out at around 78 degrees C, and the wort comes out at around 75 degrees.

1 hour draining the mash tun and sparging.

1.25 hours to bring the kettle to the boil.

1.5 hours boiling

10 minutes recirculating through my heat exchanger to sanitise it

1 hour to recirculate and pump cooled wort at 20 degrees C into my fermenter.

Overall, apart from the 3 hours it takes to heat the liquor, my brew day is around 7.5 hours. Meantime, I have plenty of time to do my cleaning and sanitising, preparing a brew for bottling etc.

Bottling and labelling 380 bottles takes me a further 5 hours so my overall time to make 380 bottles of beer is around 13 hours. I'm brewing 6 times per month at the moment, so spending the same time again on deliveries and paperwork is an average working week. I won't get rich, but financially it's worth doing and the buzz hearing from happy drinkers is tremendous.