Cold liquor tank?

[PappySlokum]

Who uses a cold liquor tank? What is its purpose? I'm new to the commercial brewery world. Teach me folks..... About to buy a system. Do I need one?

[AnthonyB]

The purpose is to prechill water used in your heat exchanger so that you can knockout colder than your groundwater temperature. Often times you can do something like CLT->HeatExchanger->HLT and save some energy/water too.

[Fausto Yu-Shan]

Cold liquor tank

As indicated in the Probrewer webpage attached:

Cold liquor tank - Cold water tanks, or cold liquor tanks as they are called in the brewery, are buffer tanks that contain cold water that will be used to cool the bitter wort down to a fermentable temperature range after boiling. A cold water storage tank can be as simple as single skin vessel in a cold room, but can also be a jacketed glycol tank or insulated tank with a cooling coil immersed in the water.

For more information follow the link:

http://www.probrewer.com/resources/usedtanks/tank_types.php

If you need one it will depend on the type of brewing system that you plan to buy.

Hope it helps.

[Beachwood]

We have an oversized CLT (50% above our brewhouse capacity) and love it. Not only does it allow us to knockout to any temp we want (even 45 deg F is no problem), but it also serves as a blending tank for our RO and carbon filtered water if we choose. We didn't want to directly tax our glycol loop for our HX and a CLT was the perfect solution for us. They also require very little maintenance in my experience.

[kirastanf]

7 bbl

I use 7 bbl CLT and it works well!

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www.restaurantpromoten.nl

[gitchegumee]

Biggest reason I use them....

A CLT does help give you consistent knockouts with regard to temperature year round when municipal/ground water temperatures change. But more importantly I use them to receive filtered water. You would have to use a massive water filtration system to treat your brewing liquor if it is predicated on knockout flow rate. Why would you do that when knockout represents such a tiny fraction of the day? You can use a much smaller filtration system if you slowly treat your water and store it in a tank. The temperature issue for me is just icing on the cake.