We are in the planning stages of our microbrewery - 15 bbl brewhouse doing Belgian style ales only. We will be doing several different beers. Our beers take 4-6 weeks to mature after primary, we are planning to cold condition for at least that long after primary fermentation is complete (some of them up to 8 weeks). This is going to take a lot of tank space to condition/mature our beers.
As I understand it there are a few ways to structure our cellar:
1: Have multiple jacketed unitanks and leave the beer in the the same tank after primary (dumping yeast until clear), cold conditioning there
2: Transfer the beer to a cheaper jacketed glycol cooled tank (brite beer tank - not much cheaper than unitanks) for conditioning
3: Put a bunch of single walled tanks (horizontal or vertical) in a cold room and move the beer to these for conditioning
Questions:
1. What are the pros and cons to each approach? I am assuming that it would be less expensive overall (taking into account the cheaper single walled vessel but with the additional cost of the extra cold room space) to use single wall conditioning tanks over unitanks but are there significant downsides to this approach?
2. Is it less expensive to keep beer cold in tanks in a cold room as compared to using glycol to chill a jacketed tank? Just in raw energy costs, that is. Assume fairly high ambient temps - Florida.
3. If we decide to go with single wall tanks in a cold box, are many people using horizontal tanks for this? What are the pro's and cons? We are somewhat space constrained (but have 22 foot ceilings) so are thinking about stacking horizontals 2 or 3 high.
4. We still have a significant amount of dead yeast and sediment drop out during the month of conditioning. How does one dump that from a horizontal tank? I hate to leave the beer sitting on it for a long time for fear of autolysis and off flavors.
Thanks for any advice.
Bill McFee
Barrel of Monks Brewing
As I understand it there are a few ways to structure our cellar:
1: Have multiple jacketed unitanks and leave the beer in the the same tank after primary (dumping yeast until clear), cold conditioning there
2: Transfer the beer to a cheaper jacketed glycol cooled tank (brite beer tank - not much cheaper than unitanks) for conditioning
3: Put a bunch of single walled tanks (horizontal or vertical) in a cold room and move the beer to these for conditioning
Questions:
1. What are the pros and cons to each approach? I am assuming that it would be less expensive overall (taking into account the cheaper single walled vessel but with the additional cost of the extra cold room space) to use single wall conditioning tanks over unitanks but are there significant downsides to this approach?
2. Is it less expensive to keep beer cold in tanks in a cold room as compared to using glycol to chill a jacketed tank? Just in raw energy costs, that is. Assume fairly high ambient temps - Florida.
3. If we decide to go with single wall tanks in a cold box, are many people using horizontal tanks for this? What are the pro's and cons? We are somewhat space constrained (but have 22 foot ceilings) so are thinking about stacking horizontals 2 or 3 high.
4. We still have a significant amount of dead yeast and sediment drop out during the month of conditioning. How does one dump that from a horizontal tank? I hate to leave the beer sitting on it for a long time for fear of autolysis and off flavors.
Thanks for any advice.
Bill McFee
Barrel of Monks Brewing
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