Opinion on cold room sizing

[wailingguitar]

We are shopping walk-ins and I am not to sure about sizing of the cooler. I would like to plan out to around 5k bbl production. Cooler will hold packaged beer, hops and not much else. With that in mind I am thinking of about 600sqft. Too big? too small? Opinions?

[porter]

It depends

Like most questions, the answer is "it depends".

We have a 250 sqft walk-in, but it is only 12ft tall and we can't get a forklift into it. That was our 1st mistake.

I would HIGHLY recommend getting one tall enough to stack pallets 3 high and a big enough door to get your lift in and out of.

I think sizing is going to depend on how much you need to store at one time. Will you be self distributing? If so, inventory going out is going to be very different from having a distributor who picks up on a regular basis and usually in decent quantity.

Are you going to have a tasting room? If so, will the cold storage hold the beer that is on draught? More space concerns there...

What about your stash? Do you plan on holding onto special beers and releasing them periodically? We're always tripping over and moving our hoarded kegs.

We're still figuring out how to use the cold space we have, but I can tell you that if I had 600 sqft, it still wouldn't be enough...

[boatbeer]

Distro?

I've seen breweries do 5K bbls / year with 100 sq ft., but they're distributor picks up every keg they fill. They have no tasting room.

We're self distributed with almost 500 sq ft. and it's way undersized. I also agree that driving your forklift into your cold room is essential. We do a lot of hand stacking.

[wailingguitar]

"It depends"... I understand, porter!

We MAY feed our taproom from the walk-in. We haven't nailed our site yet, so the building layout may be a factor

We can't self-distribute and we are looking at a distributor that is about a 15 to 20 minute drive from the area we are looking at, so regular pick ups should not be a problem.

I am definitely looking at a pallet door and at least 10' ceiling, higher would be better, but it depends on finalizing our site.

Stashing specialties? To be honest, not sure yet. I would LOVE to be able to keep back barley wine, RIS and other interesting beers to send out after prolonged aging, but who knows if that will be workable? We will be the first micro in our immediate vicinity, with the nearest others being about 60 miles away. Some aspects of the market remain to be seen and we may not be able to sit on product too long.

[redlodgesam]

too small

We brewed 5750 bbl last year and will do about 7000 bbl this year. Our original cooler is 20 x 30 x 10 ft high. We now use it for hops, tap room beer and 1/6 bbl storage. When it was the only cooler we had, we had to empty it daily to put orders together and then pack all the beer back in at the end of the day.

We now rent an additional 1800 ft of cold storage for our 1/2 bbls and packaged beer. Never underestimate how much space you need to leave for a forklift alley.

The more skus and flavors you have, the more space you will need. We brew 7 year-round draft beers, four of them are packaged, and we always have 1-2 seasonal beers going.

I agree that if you have a nearby wholesaler who will take your beer as soon as it is kegged/packaged, that would reduce the amount of cold storage you need. We self-distribute about half our beer.

Cheers,

Sam

[wailingguitar]

Thanks guys, that helped a lot

[dgarfink]

Buy a Cooler or Construct a Permanent Room?

Hi guys,

I am in a similar situation and trying to plan out my cooler size. I plan to do 2-4k bbls of canned beer in the first year and I'd like to ramp up to 8-10k bbls per year in total production eventually. I would do all of my own distribution for as long as I could, probably up to about 5k bbls.

I am looking at doing one of 2 things for cold storage, either a modular drive in/out cooler OR building out a room and using a couple swamp coolers. I think I need about 1500 sqft total and the height would be high enough to double stack pallets.

Does 1500 sqft sound reasonable?
Do you have a suggestion on modular coolers vs cooling a room?
Any other advice or suggestions?

Thanks!