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  • Glycol Chiller Loop

    Hi everyone,

    We are purchasing the equipment for a 10 bbl brewery, and we are trying to figure out the best setup regarding glycol loop.

    For cold-crashing, the maximum we would be crashing in 24 hrs is 20 bbl simultaneously, which would require about 1 ton or 5HP of chilling capacity according to my calculations.
    1. Right now, we have a single glycol chiller 10HP with built-in 150 L reservoir. Is this wise, or better to get two separate 5 HP chillers in parallel for redundancy in case one breaks down? Is the reservoir large enough?
      -
    2. Furthermore, I would like to use this system to help with the process heat exchanger (for cooling down wort between BKW and fermenters i.e. from boiling to 18C). Initially, our suppliers had recommended getting a large 2000L glycol tank in the glycol loop as a buffer, and then using a 2-stage heat exchanger with tap water in 1st stage and glycol in 2nd stage. However, I have read having a large glycol tank is a bad idea because then all 2000L of glycol in the system will be warmed up, which would take time to cool down again and you may be affecting fermenters/brites that may need very cold glycol.
      Furthermore, it would cost $4000 for the glycol alone!

      So then I adjusted the setup, to turn the glycol tank into a 2000L glycol-jacketed cold liquor tank (CLT) instead, where we would store and cool down tap water, to be used in heat exchanger. In this case, would we still need a 2-stage heat exchanger, or better just 1-stage and use only pre-cooled water, to be dumped in HLT?


    In general, any advice on the glycol loop setup?

    Many thanks in advance for all help,
    Dieter

  • #2
    A few words as to the system at our Brewery. We have the 2 stage wort chiller and one large glycol tank to cool down the fermentors,wort chiller and brite tanks. It all works quite well yes, when we use the wort chiller it cannot cool down anything else but that only lasts for 40 Minutes at most then it quickly drops back down to 28f and it doesn’t warm anything back up as the beer has too much mass.

    If I can offer one word of advice it would be this make your glycol loops simple. By that I mean one cooling and one return loop that run next to each other and have as few turns as possible, ours was the shape of a rectangle. Then your connections down to the tanks are gentle turns like 45’s NO 90’s and as little of them as possible. There is huge pressure loss in each curve so the more curves the less volume of glycol gets to each tank. I also suggest that you put filters in front of each electric valve that will allow the glycol to flow to a tank. Plumbers never clean there cuts and all this little pieces of PVC get stuck in the Valves and won’t allow it to turn off, then he next morning you check your tank that you set for 66f and it’s at 34f and it takes a week for it to recover
    Mike Eme
    Brewmaster

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by beerguy1 View Post
      then he next morning you check your tank that you set for 66f and it’s at 34f and it takes a week for it to recover
      ah, yeah. makes for a very WTF monday morning

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by beerguy1 View Post
        A few words as to the system at our Brewery. We have the 2 stage wort chiller and one large glycol tank to cool down the fermentors,wort chiller and brite tanks. It all works quite well yes, when we use the wort chiller it cannot cool down anything else but that only lasts for 40 Minutes at most then it quickly drops back down to 28f and it doesn’t warm anything back up as the beer has too much mass.

        If I can offer one word of advice it would be this make your glycol loops simple. By that I mean one cooling and one return loop that run next to each other and have as few turns as possible, ours was the shape of a rectangle. Then your connections down to the tanks are gentle turns like 45’s NO 90’s and as little of them as possible. There is huge pressure loss in each curve so the more curves the less volume of glycol gets to each tank. I also suggest that you put filters in front of each electric valve that will allow the glycol to flow to a tank. Plumbers never clean there cuts and all this little pieces of PVC get stuck in the Valves and won’t allow it to turn off, then he next morning you check your tank that you set for 66f and it’s at 34f and it takes a week for it to recover

        Do you have a source for these filters? We have the occasional issue where a valve wont open or close but if we manually open/close it at the temp controller it eventually works. We are assuming small debris is getting in the valve. Do you put one somewhere in the master loop or a small one at each valve drop?

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by briangaylor View Post
          Do you have a source for these filters? We have the occasional issue where a valve wont open or close but if we manually open/close it at the temp controller it eventually works. We are assuming small debris is getting in the valve. Do you put one somewhere in the master loop or a small one at each valve drop?
          McMaster Carr has these - I put one of the home built chiller I made for my nano - https://www.mcmaster.com/#9875k217/=1cglo3j

          Another option, that we'll be going with, is get motorized ball valves instead of solenoid style valves. They're a bit more $, but you won't arrive to sleepy yeast and a SG of 1.055 on a monday morning instead of 1.010 and an ABV of 5%..... Amazon or eBay are good sources.



          JR
          Jeremy Reed
          Co-Founder and President, assistant brewer, amateur electrician, plumber, welder, refrigeration tech, and intermediately swell fella
          The North of 48 Brewing Company
          Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

          www.no48.ca

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by dieterneck View Post
            Hi everyone,

            We are purchasing the equipment for a 10 bbl brewery, and we are trying to figure out the best setup regarding glycol loop.

            For cold-crashing, the maximum we would be crashing in 24 hrs is 20 bbl simultaneously, which would require about 1 ton or 5HP of chilling capacity according to my calculations.
            1. Right now, we have a single glycol chiller 10HP with built-in 150 L reservoir. Is this wise, or better to get two separate 5 HP chillers in parallel for redundancy in case one breaks down? Is the reservoir large enough?
              -
            2. Furthermore, I would like to use this system to help with the process heat exchanger (for cooling down wort between BKW and fermenters i.e. from boiling to 18C). Initially, our suppliers had recommended getting a large 2000L glycol tank in the glycol loop as a buffer, and then using a 2-stage heat exchanger with tap water in 1st stage and glycol in 2nd stage. However, I have read having a large glycol tank is a bad idea because then all 2000L of glycol in the system will be warmed up, which would take time to cool down again and you may be affecting fermenters/brites that may need very cold glycol.
              Furthermore, it would cost $4000 for the glycol alone!

              So then I adjusted the setup, to turn the glycol tank into a 2000L glycol-jacketed cold liquor tank (CLT) instead, where we would store and cool down tap water, to be used in heat exchanger. In this case, would we still need a 2-stage heat exchanger, or better just 1-stage and use only pre-cooled water, to be dumped in HLT?


            In general, any advice on the glycol loop setup?

            Many thanks in advance for all help,
            Dieter
            Dieter - our minds run the same!! Your just 8 months behind what I've done.

            Some comments.

            To get 20BBL from 70F to 32F in 24 hours, I get that you need 7850btu/hr, or about 3HP. 5HP is good too, it'll just work faster for you.

            Redundancy is good, but if money is tight to start out, many have run one unit systems - just have a refrigeration person on standby!!, and something that will send an alarm to your phone if the temps go all to hell over the weekend. We are getting a 14HP prochiller unit that has two 7HP compressors. If one craps out, we have to slow down, but we won't lose tanks of beer.

            As for your reservoir size, it does seem small to me. We upgraded to a 550gallon tank from a standard of 200gal on our 20HP unit. I'd think that the reservoir size should be proportional to the HP of your unit. Have a look over this:



            That document helped reassure me that i was doing the right thing in my nano build. Think of the reservoir as a buffer so that your compressor doesn't have to run non-stop (if it does you need a bigger compressor) or start and stop too often ("short-cycling" - very bad for compressors). From what I've read you don't want your compressor starting more than every 10 minutes or so.

            Now - using glycol as the second stage to chill your wort. I was gonna do the same thing, 'cause I was trying to save floorspace. Unless there's a damn good reason - DON'T DO IT!!! You'll definitely need a bigger chiller to do it - Prochiller had a monster system spec'd out for us, was almost double the cost of what we have coming now. Get a glycol jacketed CLT, and allow it to act as your "cold buffer" rather than abusing your chiller with 100's of thousands of BTU's over 30min when your chilling your wort. The real "a-ha" moment for me wasn't really to do with the glycol, but rather that we have had great success by "making" our water from RO water + additives in the nano, so I wanted to recreate that in our pro setup. So, what I ended up with is a 60BBL RO storage tank, with glycol jackets.....called a CLT. The cold RO water is then used to chill the wort, and in doing so it becomes hot RO water in the HLT, ready for the next brew. Now, despite what the project manager of the century at DME told me, it's not stupid to chill water just to heat it up again, because you just use less of it. CLT's and HLT's do not have to be a certain shape or ratio of W:H - ours are both very tall and skinny - about 6' wide and 16' tall.

            "trust yourself, you know more than you think you do...."

            Hope that helps!

            JR
            Jeremy Reed
            Co-Founder and President, assistant brewer, amateur electrician, plumber, welder, refrigeration tech, and intermediately swell fella
            The North of 48 Brewing Company
            Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada

            www.no48.ca

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Jer View Post
              Dieter - our minds run the same!! Your just 8 months behind what I've done.

              Now - using glycol as the second stage to chill your wort. I was gonna do the same thing, 'cause I was trying to save floorspace. Unless there's a damn good reason - DON'T DO IT!!! You'll definitely need a bigger chiller to do it - Prochiller had a monster system spec'd out for us, was almost double the cost of what we have coming now. Get a glycol jacketed CLT, and allow it to act as your "cold buffer" rather than abusing your chiller with 100's of thousands of BTU's over 30min when your chilling your wort. The real "a-ha" moment for me wasn't really to do with the glycol, but rather that we have had great success by "making" our water from RO water + additives in the nano, so I wanted to recreate that in our pro setup. So, what I ended up with is a 60BBL RO storage tank, with glycol jackets.....called a CLT. The cold RO water is then used to chill the wort, and in doing so it becomes hot RO water in the HLT, ready for the next brew. Now, despite what the project manager of the century at DME told me, it's not stupid to chill water just to heat it up again, because you just use less of it. CLT's and HLT's do not have to be a certain shape or ratio of W:H - ours are both very tall and skinny - about 6' wide and 16' tall.
              I agree with not using glycol to cool wort.
              I suggest getting a really good wort chilling heat exchanger. Ask the manufacturer to size it for you. For about $5000 cdn i got an alfa laval hx that will cool wort from 98 C to 12 C using 8C ground water and put out 80C hot water which is then reusable without reheating. It cools a 25 Hl brew in about 30 min.
              This is less complicated and cheaper than a cold liquor tank solution.

              Heat exchanger companies have software to size their products in terms of numbers of plates and numbers of passes. Let them know what your expected groundwater temp is and your desired chilling time and temp. It boils down to how many kg of wort per hour to chill (at what outlet temp) and how many kg water at what temp to heat. Let them size it correctly for you.
              Last edited by beerme; 04-18-2018, 05:33 AM.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by briangaylor View Post
                Do you have a source for these filters? We have the occasional issue where a valve wont open or close but if we manually open/close it at the temp controller it eventually works. We are assuming small debris is getting in the valve. Do you put one somewhere in the master loop or a small one at each valve drop?
                The McMaster Carr is the ones we use and we put 1 in front of each electric valve, not a problem since
                Mike Eme
                Brewmaster

                Comment


                • #9
                  I'll second the suggestion of a water-cooled HX for wort cooling. Size the HX right, and you'll have quick cast-backs, with the added advantage of outflow cooling water around 140-170F. Size your HL tank large enough to take advantage of this, and your water heating cost will go down, especially as you'll be double-batching your 10 bbl house to fill a 20 bbl ferm.

                  I have a used Muller Accutherm AT20-C20 with 28 plates (with a complete set of new gaskets) that might do the job for you. Check with Mueller, and if this will do the job for you, PM me. It's just sitting here taking up space.
                  Last edited by TGTimm; 04-18-2018, 10:54 AM.
                  Timm Turrentine

                  Brewerywright,
                  Terminal Gravity Brewing,
                  Enterprise. Oregon.

                  Comment

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