CO2 use for carbonating 10bbl to 2 volumes

[Pyrmir]

How long would it take to carb such a tank thru head space alone?

This is relevant to my interests. I'm currently (trying) to carbonate the first batch in our brewhouse. I have 8 HL brite tanks with a co2 intake at the top = no gas dispersing stone. How long would it take to carbonize to 2,5 volumes with top feeding co2 only? What pressure do you guys recommend? This batch is 500 L = lots of head space. I'm aiming for 7 - 7,5 HL batches when we're fully up and running.

[RobW]

This is relevant to my interests. I'm currently (trying) to carbonate the first batch in our brewhouse. I have 8 HL brite tanks with a co2 intake at the top = no gas dispersing stone. How long would it take to carbonize to 2,5 volumes with top feeding co2 only? What pressure do you guys recommend? This batch is 500 L = lots of head space. I'm aiming for 7 - 7,5 HL batches when we're fully up and running.

I'm going to be brutally honest with you here.. It's feasible to carbonate a 5 gal batch of beer with head pressure alone, 200+ .. not so much. If you have some serious time to waste, you can use your standard temp + pressure tables to carbonate, they don't discriminate by volume, only time. In my humble opinion, it makes absolutely no business sense to try to carbonate 8HL of beer by head pressure alone.. The time you'd spend waiting for it to finish, in man hours, in tank hours.. well, you could afford to buy a tank that would hold a sintered carbonation stone.. You'd be much better off just putting it in kegs and force carbonating it: 34 F .. 1/2bbl keg, 40psi - 24 hours, 20psi - 24 hours, drop to 12psi for 24 hours and check it with your Zahm.. likely will take 48 hours for the last step @ 12 to get approximately 2.5vols . There are good threads here on probrewer about carbonating beer, written by people that have way more experience than me, read them, learn them, use them.. Get a carbonation stone, get a flow meter, get a Zahm.. It will save you countless hours, and you will learn to carbonate your beer consistently every time.

Rob

[Pyrmir]

I'm going to be brutally honest with you here.. It's feasible to carbonate a 5 gal batch of beer with head pressure alone, 200+ .. not so much. If you have some serious time to waste, you can use your standard temp + pressure tables to carbonate, they don't discriminate by volume, only time. In my humble opinion, it makes absolutely no business sense to try to carbonate 8HL of beer by head pressure alone.. The time you'd spend waiting for it to finish, in man hours, in tank hours.. well, you could afford to buy a tank that would hold a sintered carbonation stone.. You'd be much better off just putting it in kegs and force carbonating it: 34 F .. 1/2bbl keg, 40psi - 24 hours, 20psi - 24 hours, drop to 12psi for 24 hours and check it with your Zahm.. likely will take 48 hours for the last step @ 12 to get approximately 2.5vols . There are good threads here on probrewer about carbonating beer, written by people that have way more experience than me, read them, learn them, use them.. Get a carbonation stone, get a flow meter, get a Zahm.. It will save you countless hours, and you will learn to carbonate your beer consistently every time.

Rob

Thanks for your input, Rob. Brutally honest is way better than brutally non-saying
The thing is, our brewhouse is pretty much makeshift and probably one of the cheapest one in my country. We spent in total around $20k in total for all equipment so we're always looking for ways to rebuild and modify our gear to suit our needs. For the carbonation tanks, I'm thinking of carbonation stones attatched by tubing from the co2 intake in the top down to the bottom and fasten it there for a more reasonable carbonation timing. The tanks are in a walk in freezer set to 0 C so cold isnt a problem. What do you think about that? Problems with sanitation?

cheers / Arvid

[mmussen]

Pyrmir

Instead of what you're thinking I'd say you should get a welder in to add a TC port near the bottom of your tanks. It can be a pain to schedule the welding. But then you can easily take things apart and clean them.
Just my 2 cents.

[Pyrmir]

Pyrmir

Instead of what you're thinking I'd say you should get a welder in to add a TC port near the bottom of your tanks. It can be a pain to schedule the welding. But then you can easily take things apart and clean them.
Just my 2 cents.

Pardon my bad english, but whats a TC port?
And whats the risk of clogging the carb stone (stainless)? How to clean them? I got warned about even touching them, the grease on fingers is said to clog the stones.

Thanks /A

[Thirsty_Monk]

Pardon my bad english, but whats a TC port?
And whats the risk of clogging the carb stone (stainless)? How to clean them? I got warned about even touching them, the grease on fingers is said to clog the stones.

Thanks /A

It think TC stands for "tri claim" connector.

http://www.gwkent.com/brewery/fittings-valves.html

You can see som e fittings there.

You can soak stone is caustic or acid. Fallow the recommended cleaning procedure by the cleaner manufacturer.

[redzim]

Question for Phil

About to open a NY Nanobrewery and I've read this thread about 3 times in the last week. It's great. I just wanted some comments from Phil on our setup. I have 1-bbl and 2-bbl brites. I have a check valve and ball valve on the top to put CO2 into the headspace. I have another ball valve w/ no check valve for venting pressure if necessary. On the 4" carb stone I have a check valve, then ball valve, then a QD into which I plug the rotameter you recommended from McMaster. I have been playing around with carbonating water, pressurizing the headspace to 10-12psi and then flowing CO2 thru the carb stone with the rotatmeter about half open. It basically seems to work but I have some questions:

1) Is it OK to have the headspace and carb stone CO2 lines teeing off the same regulator? To get 12psi in the headspace, I need to have my regulator around 14psi to crack the checkvalve. Then when the headspace is pressurized, I shut off that top ball valve, and open the rotatmeter and the ball valve feeding the stone and flow thru there. Or do I need 2 tanks with separate regulators?

2) Which leads to my next question: I have needed to set my regulator up to about 20psi to get anything flowing thru the rotameter/stone. I guess that is the wetting pressure plus check valve cracking pressure plus pressure of liquid in tank, etc. (I have tested my stones in bucket of water; they are brand new and bubble nicely) Is it OK to leave this set up overnight? In one of your previous posts you mentioned that it is possible to overcarb this way but I don't see how that could work.. with 12 psi head space pressure, if I just open my regulator so the rotameter is just starting to show CO2 flow that must mean I am getting just a little over 12psi out of my stone, right? So even if the regulator is set to 20psi or whatever, since flow would only start when pressure at the stone is greater than the head pressure? Or is my gas physics failing here? Obviously for a nice slow carbing I would only want to open the regulator until flow starts, but I'm wondering how closely I have to watch it...

thanks,
red

[gitchegumee]

Answers

1) I wouldn't use a tee. Or two tanks. Use you QD fitting to attach the regulator to the headspace to get your saturation pressure. Afterward, disconnect and use it to attach to the stone and then increase pressure until you get flow.

2) You might be able to walk away from your carbonation, but I wouldn't. There's no good reason to. You should be able to carbonate in a few hours. Watch it closely because if you don't, Murphy will have a go at it. Perhaps after you're really comfortable with your technique, you could decide to walk away.

You should also work on getting that saturation head pressure with spunding. Best case scenario is that you don't need extra pressure after fermentation to achieve a cold beer carbonation saturation pressure. You get that pressure free from your yeast, not purchased from a tank. Good luck!

[vinesrushes]

Carbonating Cider

I'm working on carbonating a batch of cider in a brite tank for the first time. Last year we carbonated a few batches in kegs - this year we're working with the new brite tank, which is a used 7bbl jacketed originally from PBST. I can drop the temp of the cider in tank down to whatever temp necessary - probably go between 32-36 and I'm going for a lighter carbonation of around 2 volumes Co2 or less. Since the cider has been sitting in the tank for a couple of months, it doesn't have much if any dissolved Co2 at this point. I'm planning to sterile filter into the brite, drop the temp and start carbonation. When filling the headspace with Co2, how do you eliminate (or just limit) oxygen? Since oxygen has a lower density, does it just get compressed at the top of the headspace above the Co2 saturated headspace? I'm pretty new to carbonation so maybe these questions are a mute point. Any other advice on this before we get started?

[soia1138]

I'm reading this as you are transferring to the brite then carbonating. If that is correct you should be purging the brite of oxygen with CO2 then pressurizing prior to your transfer. The transfer happens under pressure with no oxygen introduced into either tank.

[vinesrushes]

Transferring under pressure

Correct - transferring to the brite with a very light carbonation after aging the cider for several months (I did drop temp at the tail end of fermentation to dissolve some Co2, but this fermentation isn't happening in a traditional beer fermenter. With cider, the fermentation process is more like wine and the bottling process more like beer. Transferring to the tank under pressure doesn't work as we aren't transferring from a pressurized tank (unless I'm misunderstanding something).

I'm reading this as you are transferring to the brite then carbonating. If that is correct you should be purging the brite of oxygen with CO2 then pressurizing prior to your transfer. The transfer happens under pressure with no oxygen introduced into either tank.

[brett thackeray]

Phillip, the information you have provided to the brewing community in this thread is priceless. I am a brewery in planning and thank you very much for providing this valuable knowledge. I think everyone in this string and others that have learned from this informtion owe you deeply. Having mentors like you will continue to make craft brewing the premium choice for consumers. I also want to thank Probrewer for providing a platform of access to Pros like Phillip.

Well said, Dox! I'm with you. :-)

[Mtnmann]

Sweet! Any chance you can make it so one can expand the photo's to get a closer look at the system? I'm in the process of going from a 2 head to a 4 head and am interested in any issues you've noticed. What exactly does the header do for things?

alex

I've made a bunch of enhancements to the original johnnymax bottler design. First and foremost is a new stainless frame for mounting everything to. Next is a drip tray with a drain line like you would find in a bar under tap heads. Next is a stainless 1-1/2" manifold with a site glass and pressure gauge attached. I'll get some more videos and photos out but this is a starting place - the link is (http://vinesandrushes.com/carbonation-equipment). We bottled for the first time with this setup a few weeks ago and came out to bottling 180 gallons in about 2.5 hours - 22oz bottles, about 400 bph. That was our first bottling with this new design. We were dealing with pre-sanitized bottles in this case but the next bottling will be with a new bottle rinser design as well. We reached this speed with a crew of 5 - two people on the bottler, one capper and two drying condensation from the bottles, casing bottles and getting empty bottles ready for the people on the bottler.

Here's some documentation photos and video of our equipment - I'll be updating these with a bunch more video and other details soon.
http://vinesandrushes.com/carbonation-equipment

[vinesrushes]

Posted that in the wrong thread - moved it to here:

http://discussions.probrewer.com/showthread.php?26569-4-head-bottle-filler-for-275&p=131675#post131675

I think the header evens out the flow rate and is much easier to sanitize.

Sweet! Any chance you can make it so one can expand the photo's to get a closer look at the system? I'm in the process of going from a 2 head to a 4 head and am interested in any issues you've noticed. What exactly does the header do for things?

alex

[bb23]

Figuring out this flowmeter

Hopefully somebody can help with this... I followed Gitchegummee's recomendation and bought this flowmeter (#5079k64) from McMaster. I put it in line b/w my CO2 tank regulator and my carb stone. I pushed 13.5psi into headspace. I set my regulator to 14psi. I set the flowmeter to 1/2 scale (2.5). Gas flows through just fine, until I connect it to the quick disconnect that connects to my stone. When i do this, the ball in the flowmeter drops to 0 and the fun is over.

When am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any and all help in advance. Cheers!