Hey all,
Ran into a fun problem yesterday morning that has us pretty stumped. Our head brewer noticed a small leak on the bottom of our hot liquor tank that after later inspection is almost surely steam condensate. After talking to our tank manufacturer, they're of the opinion that a leak on the steam jacket side is almost impossible to (cost effectively) fix despite the tank being barely 3 years old.
To add even more fun to the ordeal, after checking inside the tank, there's now a pretty significant amount of corrosion on the walls. I'm rarely involved in the day-to-day brewing process anymore, but my head brewer seems fairly certain that there wasn't any noticeable corrosion at least since the last time we dosed up the tank about a week or two ago.
Only thing we've really changed recently that I can think of was dosing significantly more calcium chloride into the hot liquor (bringing us from ~50 ppm to ~150). I know stainless and chloride in general don't mix well, but simply adding more calcium chloride couldn't possibly have made that big of a difference so quickly could it?
Also it's possibly just complete coincidence, but does it seem odd that the steam jacket failed around the exact same time we noticed sudden corrosion in the tank? Is it possible something was just seriously up with our city water? I'm at a complete loss here!
Ran into a fun problem yesterday morning that has us pretty stumped. Our head brewer noticed a small leak on the bottom of our hot liquor tank that after later inspection is almost surely steam condensate. After talking to our tank manufacturer, they're of the opinion that a leak on the steam jacket side is almost impossible to (cost effectively) fix despite the tank being barely 3 years old.
To add even more fun to the ordeal, after checking inside the tank, there's now a pretty significant amount of corrosion on the walls. I'm rarely involved in the day-to-day brewing process anymore, but my head brewer seems fairly certain that there wasn't any noticeable corrosion at least since the last time we dosed up the tank about a week or two ago.
Only thing we've really changed recently that I can think of was dosing significantly more calcium chloride into the hot liquor (bringing us from ~50 ppm to ~150). I know stainless and chloride in general don't mix well, but simply adding more calcium chloride couldn't possibly have made that big of a difference so quickly could it?
Also it's possibly just complete coincidence, but does it seem odd that the steam jacket failed around the exact same time we noticed sudden corrosion in the tank? Is it possible something was just seriously up with our city water? I'm at a complete loss here!
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