bottling in a hot climate

[NicaHops]

Hey Guys,
Just getting everyones opinion on packaging (mainly running a small scale bottling line) in a hot tropical climate.
We currently do not have a brite and either keg and force carb or bottle condition our bottled beers. The next step is to get a brite and bottling machine and I'd really like start packaging our hop forward beers from a brite and counterpressure filler to reduce o2 pickup. We may still bottle condition our belgian beers and Stouts.

My ideas are to do one of the following.
1. Jacketed brite and bottle out in the heat. bottles and lines out in the heat(worried about foam issues). do people insulate the lines? run glycol next to the lines? are the lines not an issue?

2. non-jacketed brite in a cold room. mount the bottle machine on/next to the wall of the cold room so the lines are in the cold room but the actual machine is outside. hoping for less foam. bottles would be warm. We have a small tap/tasting room so I could expand the cold room size a bit.

3. same as 2 but bottle in the cold room. bottles, line, and brite all the same temp.


fyi - were a 3bbl brewery. plan would be to get 1 7bbl brite dedicated to packaging.

interested to hear what everyone does to battle hot climate foam issues. and any pieces of equipment they would recommend.

[TGTimm]

Of your option,s I'd look at #2.

We carb our beer in the brite at 30-32F. I doubt you'd want to be running a bottling line at that temp. We've found that our equipment doesn't like running much below 60F, especially the labeler.

Our bottling room temps can hit 100F + in the summer. We've insulated the hard-line that brings the product from the bright to the bottler, with a 1/2" copper pipe bonded to the line inside the insulation, running our 28F glycol. This solved a lot of our foaming problems in the summer.

You'll have to label before the bottler. Those bottles are going to sweat gallons in saturated tropical air. Keeping the carriers and cases dry will be a problem until the bottles warm up. You might consider a conditioning table/space where the bottles can come up to temp before going into the packaging.