Plastic fermenters?

[bndooley]

Brian et al,

You were right, the conversation started off with 7Bls and kind of metamorphosed into a pilot brewery. As the discussion went on, it became clear to me that a 7bl plastic fermenter might not be a great investment... although I will say that the idea of using plastic bags in the fermenters is pretty clever. But too much trouble with 7bls.

If anyone could point me towards some of this cheap dairy equipment, I would be enormously grateful. In the local scrapyards stainless is $1 a pound. And the prices on the online auctions have been pretty exorbitant.

Thanks for all of the advice and help. It's nice to be involved with such a great community.

Best,
Ben

https://www.oldcrankybrewers.com

[Diamond Knot]

Ben,

Have you thought about Grundy tanks? We used them for several years and made good beers out of them!

Source for 7 Bbl Grundies, anyone..........

Cheap, and work. A few issues..........but they work.

[bndooley]

Grundies, eh? Sound good.

Did you ferment in them or use them as serving tanks? What kind of issues do they have?

Best,
Ben

https://www.oldcrankybrewers.com

[Diamond Knot]

We used them as primry fermenters and bright beer tanks (no carbonation).

A bit harder to clean and crop yeast from, but for the price, they worked great for years in our B1 site. In fact, we now use them there just as bright beer tanks.
If you can get your hands on the little 3.5 Bbl versions, you'll heave some real gems on your hands. Attach a set of casters on the bottom and they'll go anywhere in your Brewery. I welded casters on our 7 Bbl Grundies and we've rolled them around a lot in the past (empty, 'o course).

As I mentioned, cropping yeast from these is a pain. It's not the best practice, but worked for us for many years. After transfer, we stirred the yeast up at the bottom and drained into a corny keg for repitching. I'll try to put together a "lessons learned" list if you want one.

[BeersmithMT]

This company in CO has a huge inventory of used dairy equipment. They post on-line prices for their equipment, but you should be able to bargain. Freight might be a big issue for you though.

http://www.dairyeng.com/usedequip.asp

Calling some dairy supply houses in your area should give you some leads.

Brian is (once again) correct. Grundys make inexpensive tanks for many uses in the brewery. Grundys are usually 7bbl and can be easily found. They usually sell in the $1,000 - $1,500 range. They are most easily used as bright/serving tanks, however, they can be modified with cooling jackets to be used as fermenters, etc. However, unless you are a skilled sanitary welder, you might spend more retrofitting than you would to buy decent used fermenters. I assume the issues that Brian referred to are: sourcing replacement parts (gaskets/closures for certain models/styles can be challenging); there are often non-sanitary threads on Grundys that make brewers nervous; lower pressure ratings; and last (and least) they are not always the most attractive tanks around.

[bndooley]

Awesome, thanks very much.

Brian, if you have the time, I would love to read your "lessons learned" list. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one. It seems like there are a lot of people on the list who struggle with grundies.

Best,
Ben

https://www.oldcrankybrewers.com

[tarmadilo]

I just want to say that I did a lot of business with Dairy Engineering in Colorado a few years back, and they were incredibly helpful. Good guys!

Cheers, Tim

[Hofer]

Fermenting in plastic: revived

Hi knowledgeable folks,

I revive this outdated thread when eagerly looking for advice, and in hope to give the fermenting in plastic a bit different tech twist.

My nano-2.5hl brewery will be comprised of a brewhouse based on more or less conventional SS vessels ordered locally that should be at my porch in about a month, and plastic fermenters. Different style ales will be brewed by small batches, bottled manually and distributed as single bottles to local pubs and liqueur stores.

The commercial concept for such a brewery is rather simple and looks bullet-proof: investing $1000,000 you can lose $1000,000; investing $10,000 you can’t lose more than $10,000.

Of course plastic is only considered for its price.

I am looking for advice on choices for fermenting in plastic.

For a primary fermentation the choice is between Mauser (blue) 220L (55gal) drums or 270-290L (or even bigger) food grade bins. As far as I am for an open fermentation, bins sound better: their aspect ratio encourages healthy fermentation and more successful yeast skimming.
Also bins are more traditional. Look at the beauties at
http://www.bobdennis.co.uk/brew/ferment.htm !

But drums also have their advantages: the aspect ratio! They could be placed for fermentation not at air conditioned or walk in rooms but inside temperature controlled refrigerator that is more effective, more versatile and less expensive.
Otherwise both bins and drums could be cooled with cooling plates and what looks even better choice with cooling snakes:

http://morewinepro.com/view_product/5748/102942

Of course in this case there is a need for cold water pumping or for cold maturating a glycol system.

BTW, do the plastic (HDPE) has any taint?

For the secondary I used to rack to another vessel and for that stage drums look pretty natural plastic favorites. In this case racking-pumping sounds more comfortable than forklifting.

What I can’t decide on is usefulness and worthiness of investment in “Bin Storage Bags” for drums and bins. (http://www.flextank.com.au/Drum-Bin_Bags.htm)
The idea itself and the whole concept and its implementation look very impressive at this site. It is tempting to order some of these nice high-tech bags, but if plastic as HDPE is food grade, taintless and not oxygen permeable and used MINT drum costs $15, what the bags need for? Or to the contrary there are reasons for using the bags?

One more feature at the above site that looks tempting or at least interesting is their “barrel wand” direct cooler (http://www.flextank.com.au/Direct-cooling.htm).
For mere AU$980 (US$700?) you get a refrigerating unit with cooling coil that could cold stabilize (?) up to 500l!
The last but not least issue I can’t find solution is a small scale bottling when there is no pressurized bright beer tank but the above mentioned plastic drum.
All these counter pressure fillers are designed for pressure filling, or am I mistaken?
What has left for me if I referment in bottle with sugar/wort? Simple plastic/SS fillers on hoses or something more sophisticated exists?

I would highly appreciate any advice or input.

[tarmadilo]

Well, I used 55-gal food-grade plastic barrels. I brewed using Alexander's Pale Malt Extract and Wheat Malt Extract from California Concentrates as my base, with steeped specialty grains per recipe. I had a 7-bbl kettle and two 1 1/2-bbl kettles (50 gallon), all steam-fired. I would brew, knock out through a heat exchanger, and run the wort into the barrels (already sitting on pallets), pitch yeast and FermCap, and take them with either a pallet jack or a forklift to the fermentation room, air-conditioned to 60 degrees F, with lids loosely placed on top.

I'd note that for my first few batches, I put the lids on tight and put airlocks on them, as would a homebrewer, and those things blew right across the room! Seems 10x the volume of beer (and CO2) just overwhelms a homebrew bubbler airlock! And a fermenter filled almost to the top is gonna foam over without FermCap!

So, after fermentation was complete, I'd transfer via forklift to a large walk-in refrigerated room, where the beer was chilled and aged for at least a week. I didn't rack it off the yeast, and this wasn't a problem.

After the appropriate cold storage time, I'd pump the beer out of the barrels using a racking tube I had fabricated for me that I could set for depth (obviously wanting to avoid pulling yeast off the bottom of the barrel!), pumped into a plate and frame filter with a carbonating stone setup just downstream. This fed into a 50-foot hose (which gave the beer plenty of time to absorb CO2) which led to a kegging manifold with four heads, so I could fill 1-4 kegs at a time.

Totally Rube Goldberg, but it worked and with a little bit of experimentation, I was able to keg clear, properly carbonated beer!

Problems: as mentioned, scratched plastic. It never occurred to me to look for food-grade plastic bags for the fermenters, that would have been extremely useful! Also, as with pretty much ANY brewing operation, clean and sanitary conditions MUST be kept, and while I didn't have any serious infections, there were a few batches that had shorter shelf-lives than I would have preferred...

Cheers, Tim

[Hofer]

Tim, thank you for your helpful input.

Amazing story!

Had you to cool down or warm up the fermentation room with AC?
I have always to cool down so the question is why to air condition and not to build walk in fermentation room or to use a fridge? Was it cost effective?

The carbonating “on the fly” idea looks very attractive but how w/o expensive measuring devices could you set up on specific CO2 content? As for my understanding with carbonating stone, it's like with oxygenation, you can only set up pressure-time to achieve approximate carbonization.
When bottling there is no “one more chance” like with kegs to bleed/add pressure.

Was that kegging manifold a regular keg filler or a kind of some thing special?
I think to try in a future manual filling. But it would be a different story…

Cheers.

Leonid

[tarmadilo]

Tim, thank you for your helpful input.

Amazing story!

Had you to cool down or warm up the fermentation room with AC?
I have always to cool down so the question is why to air condition and not to build walk in fermentation room or to use a fridge? Was it cost effective?

The room was already air conditioned, and held temperature quite well, so it functionally WAS a walk-in fermentation room. Air conditioners work well at 60 degrees, while that's on the high side for a refrigeration unit.

The carbonating “on the fly” idea looks very attractive but how w/o expensive measuring devices could you set up on specific CO2 content? As for my understanding with carbonating stone, it's like with oxygenation, you can only set up pressure-time to achieve approximate carbonization.
When bottling there is no “one more chance” like with kegs to bleed/add pressure.

Was that kegging manifold a regular keg filler or a kind of some thing special?
I think to try in a future manual filling. But it would be a different story…

I think if I was bottling, I'd go with bottle conditioning, as you're right that regulating the CO2 would be difficult at best with the kind of guerilla brewing approach I was using!

The kegging manifold was just a stainless steel pipe with valves and fittings to a number of filling heads (I think it had six heads). Nothing particularly complicated. It was eleven years ago, and I can hardly remember what it looked like!

Cheers, Tim

[Hofer]

(Bottling from) plastic fermenters

I think if I was bottling, I'd go with bottle conditioning...

That is what I'm going to do. But how the process of bottle filling could be improved relatively to a "homebrewer set": tapping to a plastic filler?
Does the Blichmann BeerGun thingy help?
Do you have in mind any other solution?

Thank you.

Cheers,

Leonid

[Rosie]

I would highly appreciate any advice or input.

Hi Hofer,

I was using the 225 l Mauser type blue bins with the clamp on style lid. I had no problem with any sort of taint or with contamination after extended use and found no contamination between different yeast strains. I built a primitive CIP device and used a normal brewery cleaning regime of hot caustic, rinse, and PAA prior to use.

One of the biggest problems is getting the beer out of the bin. After messing with a bung/stainless spear method - by messing I mean by shooting it thru the roof of my brew shed ....I drilled two holes in the lid and fitted 2 bulkhead 3/8 inch John Guest fittings. One fitting had a tube inside the tank that extended close to the bottom. I would then transfer by adding some pressure to the other bulkhead fitting...be warned, as I don't know what these are rated to, but I ran them 3-5psi during transfer without blowing them up...

One problem with this method is that the stretching of the lid under pressure causes the oring seal to no longer stay put in the lid...I just ran some 3/8 beer tube from the CO2 fitting into a bucket of PAA for my 'airlock'

For my ales I really only had a problem with keeping the ferment warm enough and believe it or not, I just had a heating blanket on a temp controller to sort that out...it worked and I didn't burn the house down...

With the couple lagers that I did with this setup, I hung a stainless cooling coil (reclaimed from an underbar chiller) from the two 3/8 John guest fittings and used the recirc function of an under bar chiller to cool it down...this of course controlled by a temp controller...it worked.

If I were you, I'd go with new bins...I looked at used and they usually smelled of whatever was in them...here in the UK these bins new were about 45 GBP (okay expense at 90 with the crap dollar rate, but surely you can find them cheaper)...I think I would also go with some sort of ball valve at the bottom of the tank and bulkhead in the lid to add CO2 for transfer.

You also need to figure out how to condition/drop the yeast. Tim had the liberty of using the fork lift to move things around...my wife wouldn't let me have a fork lift at home, so I transferred the bin to 8 cornies with the dip tubes cut one inch... These went into a big freezer (at 2 C) and then I transferred to normal cornies when bright, then force carbonated. Most of the time by what I call the 'shake and bake' method as I was always trying to keep up...

When I think of it, it was pretty mad...but hey, about as mad as what we are doing on a larger scale now...

On the bottling front, I have a Beer Gun and I can recommend you give it a try. As much as I like a bottle conditioned beer, most people aren't 'conditioned' to having chunks of yeast in their beer. The beer gun is a pragmatic solution to the 3 handed counter pressure fillers. It allows you to bottle from a carbonated (forced usually, which is pretty easy to control carbonation) cornie keg. The key is you need to have the beer as cold as you can get it without freezing it (0C or even lower) and you need to go slow. With it, you can pre-evac the bottle with CO2 and after filling you can cap on foam.

If you insist on bottle conditioning, I think the beer gun can be used (much more rapidly) to help with the process as it is a one handed tool, plus you could do a closed transfer from say a primed keg instead of the bottling bucket.

Best of luck with your nano brewery and remember to "Relax" when things don't go to plan!

Cheers,

[Hofer]

Hi Jeff,

Your system was really awesome!


I am not a technically minded person so my future system should be in harmony with an absence of tech skills.

An open fermentation is my favorite and to the contrary to a closed and pressurized system it almost eliminates necessity for bungs or spears or bulkheads or whatever. I also believe pumping should just work well to move beer all around.

These are good news that you found the drums taintless and contamination free. I will use the same cleaning mode as you have just will do it manually. Do you remember what were caustic concentration and temperature?

Heating blanket sounds my way of doing things. It could be I would prefer temperature controlled fridges to a standard walk in room. It could be less expensive and more flexible. Even cheaper than underbar chiller.

At http://www.flextank.com.au/Drum-Bin_Bags.htm they say that to get rid off the smells you shouldn’t try to wash them off completely but just leave the drums opened to naturally deodourize. $15 a drum used just once is a bargain that couldn’t be missed.

Skimming not dropping is my preferred method for dealing with yeast. For me it is the happiest part of the process.

Wort and beer will be moved around by pumping.

On the bottling front I got an answer on r.f.c. from Dan Listermann: “For bottle conditioned beers, any wine bottle filler will work just fine.” I value it as genius simple.
Just don’t understand how I didn’t think about the solution earlier!

Thank you for your time and effort spent on the writing.
It could be that I should give myself more time to learn more lessons from the story.

Cheers.

Leonid

[uptown brothers]

what does anybody think about lagering in HDPE tanks? I understand the concern re primary fermentation for sure but I can see plastic as a way to give me the lagering capacity in the cellar of the building we're looking at for a lot less than current stainless prices, even used. Which are, in my model, and with the numbers on our loan app, prohibitive.

I like lagers, and I think a large number of potential new craft brew customers in the particular location I'm looking at would be more easily wooed to a 5% ABV Dortmunder or Vienna, as a shorter jump from the American light lagers (or even Heinekin/Stella etc) they're now drinking, than to say a porter or stout. While I also think the existing craft brew drinkers can be wooed to the style too, even if they are more into double IPAs and RIS's right now--session ales and lagers being the subject of a lot of favorable press and beer website posting these days.

But while I would have the cellar space I don't think I have (or am likely to get) the money for stainless lagering tanks.

Once the beer's ready for lagering it's already at least a little infection resistant as a 5% alcohol solution, isn't it? Plus I don't see the lager tanks as requiring the sort of vigorous scrubbing that might lead to scratches. What's gonna be left behind in there, the last little bit of yeast residue? Plus they're going to be at 1 to 3 degrees C (or 34-36 F), in a walk-in, in my current plan. My (perhaps undiscriminating) palate never perceived any plastic-y tastes from lagering dorts and helles and marzens in HDPE containers as a homebrewer, where the small batch size meant more plastic-to-beer contact than will occur in say a 250 gallon HDPE tank....

By the same token, it sure seems like HDPE or even MDPE ought to work for a cold liquor tank too....

Am I nuts, or even just wrong?