Tapping a jacketed brite tank behind the bar

[Chadgregory87]

I'm weeks away from opening my own brewery and I'm trying to build and wondering if anyone knows of a brewery that taps directly from their jacketed brite tanks. We have four jacketed brites behind our bar and would like to use them as serving tanks, each with their own draft tower faucet secured against the tank. As in a (x-amount of ft) insulated beer line that comes off the tasting port, sits next to or on the brite tank a couple feet up the side of the tank and is threaded/clamped on to a faucet where your beer is dispensed as if you were pouring from a draft tower. We are trying to avoid individual glycol trunk lines if at all possible. Maybe just a well insulated 3/16" SS tubing, and/or a restricter faucet? Or would I need individual glycol trunk lines?
In a perfect scenario, I would use these 10bbl tanks as serving tanks for the first 50-75% and then keg the remaining bbls, clean and fill up the next day. I obviously would need my carbonation level to be consistent all the way down to the remaining bbls. Any experience with this? Are there any reasons that I'm forgetting about that say this idea wouldn't work?
Also we have a 20 beer draft tower in the works so we're not banking on these being my only four beers on tap.
Any ideas, comments or referrals are appreciated.
Thank you.

[patbrewer]

We do something similar and have never seen any one else doing such a thing. Pulling directly from a jacked tank is romantic but very impractical. At this point we run 10', 3/16" serving lines off the racking arms to our tap towers. The lines are insulated, can't say it makes a difference...perhaps a stainless line would help. When were busy its no problem, beer does not spend much time in lines, no big foam issues. As soon as things die down you have to purge the lines, warm beer, too much foam, off flavors from warm line beer. That all being said, were open and doing well. Our losses in foam on the bar are tolerable in the short run but we will be installing line chillers in the future. One thing to remember is line length is determined by head pressure as well as the height of the beer in the tank. You may need more line than the height from your serving port to comfortable pour height. Also, a lot of the foaming problems in this scenario comes from the taps, they seem to get dirty faster pulling from the tanks, we pull a foamy tap, take it apart and clean it, usually does the trick.
Good luck!

[LongLiveLagers]

We do. The trunk line has a glycol line to keep it cold. We use flojets to deliver (and you must) also. Your thermowell has to be located pretty low on the tank

[Chadgregory87]

Thanks for the insight guys!


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[Chadgregory87]

We do. The trunk line has a glycol line to keep it cold. We use flojets to deliver (and you must) also. Your thermowell has to be located pretty low on the tank

You use flojets to deliver beer out of the tank to the taps? Is Co2 head pressure not enough to push the beer out?


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[LongLiveLagers]

Nope. You have to keep head pressure at equilibrium or it will over carbonate

[Chadgregory87]

What if we were to have a restrictor faucet on the tap with a 10'-15' draft line?

[patbrewer]

That's what we do, flow control faucets on 10'-15' lines. We do not use folwjets or any pumps etc... We push our tanks with a beer gas blend and have no problems with over or under carb issues. The problem is warm lines and beer loss at the tap. Glycol trunk lines will solve this problem.

[charronc]

I'm doing this as well. All lines are glycol chilled. We would be able to get away without pumps if we were only serving from our main floor bar (10-13 psi head pressure CO2 depending on style should keep your beer perfectly carbonated at 2C) but we have a mezzanine bar 200+ feet away and 14' up, so pumps are needed. Chilled lines run from the serving tanks to"pump boxes" that are custom made insulated electrical cabinets that house 4 pumps, for 4 tanks. Immediately after the pump outlets there's a 3 way manifold with shutoffs, and then one line from each pump joins up and exits the cabinet as 3 bundles each carrying 4 different beers. These bundles all splice in downline with the bundles from the other pump box, and 3x 8 line bundles go out to the bars. Everything is pretty tightly packed into the pump boxes, there are enough glycol lines running around in there, and the insulation is good enough that most of the stuff stays good and cold. 8 10BBL tanks served this way. Works like a dream, even Monday at 2pm.

I also have 2 more tanks that only serve the downstairs bar, they're kept at 12C and hooked up to a cask breather. Dispensed through beer engines. The serving tank is treated as a hybrid cask of sorts. Demand valve on the lines due to the height of the beer being above the hand pump when the tank is more than half full.

Not the easiest way of doing things, but the whole brewery area is surrounded by glass, we didn't want a standard walled walk-in, and a glass walled fridge presented code issues.

The only upgrade I'd like to do one day is to somehow waterproof the whole thing. The lines, especially the ones that actually connect to the serving tanks, get pretty wet and I imagine will at some point become so waterlogged as to lose most of their insulation properties. Right now the plan is to just keep replacing the insulation once a year or so.