7 BBL Electric Kettle

[fhob]

Hello forum -- would be grateful for any and all opinions.

We are a start-up 7 BBL brew pub in the process of determining what type of heating element to use for our kettle.

For reasons of initial investment cost, space and ease of permitting, we are strongly considering an electric heated kettle.

Please fire away with your experience, opinion and advice. Is electric going to take way too long to heat up? And once heated, will it cause problems? How about cleaning -- is it more laborious?

Direct fired -- any pros and cons there worth mentioning?

Any brew pubs with the experiences care to comment?

We appreciate your support!!

Thank you.
Arthur

[ColdFusion]

I thought I'd chime in since you aren't getting any hits here. We are currently planning a 7BBL electric brewhouse. Our estimates are that we need at minimum 30kW of elements in the BK. The plan is to use three 15kW elements at a reasonably low watt density (60-80) to have some redundancy and be able to throttle back.

It's a lot of power and you'll need 3ph/240V at minimum. Considering all the other electrical that we need, finding a suitable location isn't easy outside an industrial park.

[KaskaskiaBrew]

Not sure if it helps with your planning but we have a 1bbl system as our pilot system that runs on 2 5500w elements and it takes about 30 minutes to bring it up to a boil. We tried with a single 5500w element and it took way too long to boil. I'd say about 10kW per bbl is a good rough number to shoot for. Once it's boiling you probably need much less to keep it going.

Arthur,

Our 3bbl kettle is gas fired. The positives are that it's easy to clean compared to pulling the heating elements each time and it provides a large area of heat so not much worry with scorching (ours is a forced air burner). The downside is that you have to get gas lines plumbed in, plus make sure to exhaust the gas and have enough make up air. Personally, I like our gas better because cleaning those elements sucks. The electric is easy to control but requires quite the control panel to keep it going. Also, take extreme caution to ground everything because with that much electric and liquids, you don't want to accidentally cook yourself.

Cheers,

I thought I'd chime in since you aren't getting any hits here. We are currently planning a 7BBL electric brewhouse. Our estimates are that we need at minimum 30kW of elements in the BK. The plan is to use three 15kW elements at a reasonably low watt density (60-80) to have some redundancy and be able to throttle back.

It's a lot of power and you'll need 3ph/240V at minimum. Considering all the other electrical that we need, finding a suitable location isn't easy outside an industrial park.

[ColdFusion]

Not sure if it helps with your planning but we have a 1bbl system as our pilot system that runs on 2 5500w elements and it takes about 30 minutes to bring it up to a boil. We tried with a single 5500w element and it took way too long to boil. I'd say about 10kW per bbl is a good rough number to shoot for. Once it's boiling you probably need much less to keep it going.

The power needed isn't linear as you increase batch size since it's mainly dependent on heat loss from the vessel, which in turn is dependent on exposed surface. A 7BBL BK is a much smaller volume:surface area ratio than one that is 1BBL and should lose a lot less heat proportionally.

We're shooting for about 1 hour heating to boil since that should align well with sparge time. Of course, we haven't tried it yet but we are basing it on some calculations.

[Black Acre]

We currently have a 3 BBL (145 gallon) kettle that is powered by 4 6kW elements for 24 KW of total power. It takes about 45-55 mintues to get from 150 to a rolling boil. It terms of cleaning, CIP does most of the work and the direct spray from a hose with caustics gets the rest. We take them out and deep clean them every other week.

[ChesterBrew]

Black Acre, do you have the Stout/Brewmation 3bbl setup? How many amps does your system require?

[roc-craven]

Black Acre, do you have the Stout/Brewmation 3bbl setup? How many amps does your system require?

I'm assuming he uses 1ph 240v. 100 amps is what it takes to run the boil kettle with all the elements on. watts/volts=amps

[Black Acre]

Yes, we are using a stout/brewmation kettle and the elements run off 2 60 amp single phase breakers.

[fhob]

Any comment of cost of electric heated kettle ad whether it interferes with electricity needs for everything else in the brewhouse? We are a pub so will have myriad electricity needs. Mthanks forum, you are awesome.

[greenmtnbrewer]

I noticed that Glacier sells an insulated BK. I am wondering if the added cost would pay for itself in reduced electrical usage ? It's an $800 added cost for the 3 BBL BK. By your numbers , you may be using about 75 KW/H per Brew? Maybe somewhere in the range of 11-15$. Anyone know how much energy the insulation would save?