Horizontal tank - can it work?

[barleyjac]

We are looking at a 150 BBL horizontal ageing tank that is cooled by a bottom jacketed Freon jacket. Has anyone had experience with these kinds of tanks?

My concern is freezing the beer on the bottom of the tank while the top half stays warm. Is recirculating an option? I really don't want to keep yeast in suspension, but I don't want to filter warm beer either.

The price is good but we do not want to do anything that will affect the quality of the beer. Any advice?

[Jephro]

Yes, with a but...

I brewed for a company that used Horizontal, freon jacketed dairy tanks as FV's. They made great beer, more so lagers than ales but good beer nonetheless.

Freezing can be an issue, i noticed it a few times when the jacket kicked on during CIP. The trick is to keep the thermostat set within a few degrees of the beer temp, in other words if crash cooling just do it a few degrees at a time. We only filled the tanks about halfway, so most of the beer was touching a jacket and we really had few issues with temp difference + stainless is pretty good conductor for that beer not touching the jacket.

The setup there had a Primary FV, a Secondary FV, and a Tertiary FV.
We had them setup so gravity would move the beer from primary to secondary and so on. This also allowed us to get the beer off the yeast, BTW harvesting ale yeast from one of the tanks if a futile and unsanitary effort at best. This way the freon jacket only has to hold the temp of the beer.

I assume you plan to ferment in a conical and then transfer to the horizontal just to age, is this correct? If this is the case, i would say ferment, dump yeast, crash cool, dump yeast again and then transfer the cold beer to the horizontal to age. This way the freon jacket only has to hold the beer at temp, reducing any risk of freezing. (Not that i would know anything about freeze distilling...but)

[Fred Scheer]

freezing bottom

HI:
It's funny, the same question was on today's BA Forum.
Here is my response to the forum and the question:


If you have a bottom and top (or middle..) cooling of your tank,
can't you close the bottom part separately?

Also, did you had already beer freezing on the bottom of the tank?
My experience is that the bottom layer of the tank is ~ 5*F higher than
beer in the middle or at top.
You can also calculate the freezing point of your beer,
to make sure that your cooling material temperature is not below that
of the freezing point of your beer or better, the beer at the bottom of the tank.

The freezing point of a beer is given as Freezing point
(°C) = –0.42 × A + 0.04 × E + 0.2 in which A is the percent of
alcohol content by weight and E is the original gravity of the wort
(3). On this basis, each 1% increase in alcohol content lowers the
freezing point by 0.42°C and each increase in gravity of 1°Plato
(P) raises it by 0.04°C. Thus, no beer will freeze at –1°C, and
products at higher alcohol concentrations (including high-gravity
brews prior to dilution) will withstand even lower temperatures.

IMHO, I would stay away from using the agitator.
You will do damage to yeast in suspension.

Cheers

Fred Scheer

[Jephro]

Inspiration move me brightly

HI:
It's funny, the same question was on today's BA Forum.

GA zip code- sounds like those turtles all all over the forums today

I'd stay away from the agitator too, as Fred said rip that sucker out.