Indoor grain silo?

[JoeV]

Is it possible to put a grain silo indoors? Our grain consumption is going up but the landlord will not alow any outdoor instalations. We do have 30ft of clearance indoors. Does anyone else have a silo indoors, or is it a really bad idea?

[beauxman]

Talk to the guys at Diamond Knot, they can give you some good info.
-Beaux

[GlacierBrewing]

The now-defunct HC Berger brewery of Ft. Collins had grain silos outside but we had a very tall silo inside that was used as a grain hopper on load cells. Don't see why a grain silo proper wouldn't work inside. Might even be more advantageous due to controlled environment, etc. If it were me, I'd allow for venting port and filling ports to the outside to minimize grain dust being blown throughout your brewhouse and cellar during grain deliveries. Think: grain dust in your yeast!
Dave

[xjr2310]

we have an indoor silo

we have an indoor silo at lakefront brewery in milwaukee, it holds about 50,000 lbs.

[BeersmithMT]

In constructing our new facility we considered an indoor silo because of some outside issues and ultimately decided against it. As Dave mentioned, you would definitely want to vent your vent pipe outside. Also, depending on size of freight doors etc, you might have to go with a corrugated "panel" silo that you could build (and remove later) in place.

[MikeJordan]

indoor silos

We have 4 indoor grain silos. 2 @ 100K lbs and 2 @ 20k lbs. I believe the primary reason being city ordinance. They're hooked up to a central aspiration system to handle all the dust from loading. The door hatches for the large silos are outside so not too much of an issue. The smaller silos are totally inside with the hatches being problematic. If the grain delivery driver is snoozing while unloading his trailer and allows the bin to go empty for awhile we used to have a real dusty mess, requires lots of mopping. If building the silos indoors try to have the hatches vent to the outside of the building unless you love cleaning!

[MJMurphy]

It sounds like indoor silos are fairly common, but we may have one variation.

We have two indoor silos (approx 20k) that we use not for base malt, but for other grain (wheat and caramel malt currently). However, instead of using pneumatic delivery, we use a grain auger to unload super-sacks into the silos.

We haven't used pneumatic delivery, but after watching the dust fly after the dust collection sock blew off one of our outdoor silos, I can only imagine.