Serving Tank Anatomy

[Guest]

We are looking to build 500Liter serving tanks for our new brewery. We have a guy who built tanks for Petro-Brasil for 25 years, so he is very talented. We are looking for a simple design for serving tanks. Does anyone out there have plans or a diagram for serving tanks. What kind of Stainless to use, where the co2 enters, where the beer exits..etc. The more info the better. Thanks a million! cheers.

nagareshi@yahoo.com

http://www.karamuru.com

[gitchegumee]

Main thing is to keep it sterile! Just having a tank made of stainless does not make a beer-quality tank. I assume these will be in a cold room, otherwise the production techniques for welding dimple jackets & cladding the tanks are just too involved to make without the proper facility and craftsmen. In that case, you would be better served buying used. Sanitary welding the thinwall tubing typically used in breweries is not easy to do properly. It takes practice to develop the correct technique. Most field pipe welders cannot do it right out of the box. Get an example of a proper TIG welded (fused is a better term) tube segment where you can see the inside of the tube. This might change your welder's mind about the job. ALL tools used must be exclusively for stainless. Any prior contact of tools with carbon steel will make rust on your new tanks. Use dished and flanged heads for top & bottom. Thicker material for the dishes than on the sidewall. Try to keep the vessel squat, not tall. The finish should be 2B, welds back-ground and polished. Safety Relief Valve on the top. Spray ball through the top on a CIP arm. Top of this arm should have a small valve branching off for a sight tube that runs to the drain pipe, also with a small isolation valve. Pressure gauge on a half coupling on CIP arm. Make sure that every surface is thoroughly cleaned by CIP ball. Double and triple check this. Carbonating stone in the lower 1/4 of the tank. Ditto for sanitary sample valve. All these fittings must be removable on sanitary couplings. Tri-clover is the standard in US. The stubs for these fittings must be kept very short to ensure proper cleaning. Depending on whether you filter or not, you may want a removable dam on the drain inside the tank. Legs should not be directly welded to your bottom, but instead to reinforcing pads to spread the load. You should hydrostatically test the tank with WATER to at least 1.5 times maximum working pressure; typically 1.5 bar if you use SRV's set at 1.0 bar. These are just some ideas and NOT meant to serve as any kind of specification. Good luck!