direct fired burner sizing 20bbl

[timshore]

There are a lot of threads on here about burner sizing and I have been following them for years but as i approach burner selection I have not come across one for my specific application. direct fired 20bbl kettle. what is the recommended size burner for this? our gas line is 2million btu so we have the capacity. midco was asking what the "BTU/H firing rate requirement" whatever that means.

does anyone have any insight?

Tim
Buried Acorn Brewing

[kezgin]

Our 15bbl kettle has a Midco RE4850A running about 280,000 BTU(according to the orifice size in the manual) and it's way too much. The burner usually gets turned on at 150 gallons and is boiling before the kettle is full

[Catfish002]

Headspace

Unrelated to the burner question but something I noticed: According to the tank drawing you posted, that 20bbl kettle only has 25% headspace. That's pretty tight and will probably be hard to yield 20bbls of sellable product. Might want to see if they could build the kettle bigger. A boil over at 20bbls is a huge mess and potentially dangerous. 20bbl brew kettle with a total volume of 930 gallons (50% head space) instead of 772 gallons might be better to work with at your brewery.