Brite Tanks twice the size of Brewhouse?

[AnchorBay]

So I’ve noticed a lot of people’s specs typically have 4-5 fermenters that are the same size as their brew house, but then they will have usually one Brite that is at least double. My guess here is that they are double batching and then mixing in the Brite for carbing and consistency, but why not have a double size ferm and double batch into that? Am I missing something with mixing the batches in the Brite instead of in the ferm?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks to all.

[UnFermentable]

Personally I opt to double both the Ferms and the Brites, or even quad them when I can brew doubles in one day. The only advantage I can see to only doubling the Brite would be when running large packaging runs. You can blend two of the same batches when needed, and don't have to the rest of the time. If your packaging runs fast enough to do two batches in one day, it prevents a change over from tank to tank.

[BrewinLou]

Most brewers do have double and quad sized FVs and BBT. There are many reasons to do this. Less time cleaning tanks, less chemicals, brewhouses can produce from 1 - 12+ batches of wort in a 24 hour period depending on design. Your brewhouse is not making you money just sitting there looking pretty in my opinion.

[xFutballFanx]

We have a double sized BBT because we used it as a CLT until we had a dedicated CLT. Having a double sized BBT but not a double sized FV doesn't make sense, as it would make much more sense to double brew for consistency as opposed to brew two seperate fermentations and two seperate filter runs.

[dick murton]

To me, it depends on what you are packaging. Firstly, as a couple of others have said, and for the same reasons - no bigger than the FVs. One other point is that beer is better kept for an extended period with yeast in, rather than filtered so if packaging is slow and extends over a couple of days - filter / transfer separately from the same tank into separate BBTs.

Depending on package types, volumes etc., I would go for smaller BBTs rather than larger ones, as this means for instance you could have a high CO2 beer for bottles and a lower CO2 for kegs, all using the same beer, but gassed up differently.

[lhall]

a rule of thumb I like is, have 2x the brite tank capacity as you expect to package daily. Then you can be transfering/filtering into half of your brite tanks, while packaging out the other half. We have a mix of 2-80s, 1-120, and 1-40. So we can package out 120 bbls a day, while filtering 120 bbls for the next day.