How to choose a brewhouse?

Brewhouse, also means mash system. Mashing system is the core of the whole set of equipment, and it is the process of extracting wort from malt. Namely: "mash- lauter - boiling - whirlpool" four main process steps; These four functional steps are completed by several tanks, called "several saccharifiers". Hot water tank belongs to auxiliaries. 

Every brewery should be a temple of production, safety and innovation. The brewery is the heart and engine of the brewing enterprise, and many of its complex systems and operations require constant vigilance, maintenance and safety. The journey to the perfect brewing team is a long road full of major decisions. Is your system's size, available space, required flavor impact, heating time, and using the right chemicals at the right frequency easy to clean? There are lots of questions. What is the heat way, or do you have a lock-out and tag-out procedure to help workers avoid injury when servicing machinery?

Choose a brewhouse which is suitable for your work method and selected location, allowing you to produce the amount of wort you plan.

Research all available configurations. The brewhouse can consist of a small number of multi-purpose tanks, capable of performing multiple stages of the brewing process (mash mixer/lauter tun, kettle/whirlpool), or a combination of multiple tanks, each of which performs a separate brewing process. Some configurations also include a hot water tank.

What decides the capacity of a brewery?

1) The amount of a batch of wort

Find out how much wort a batch can produce. For each system, it takes about 7 to 8 hours to complete a batch. In this case, the design of the brewery does not play an important role because it is the time required to perform all the processes occurring in the brewery: heating water, saccharification, filtration, adding hops and transferring wort to the fermentation tank.

2) Batches quantity in 24 hours

Nevertheless, the amount of a batch of wort does not completely determine the capacity of the brewery. Why?

-You can do more than one batch per day.
-Some brewery designs allow the process to be performed simultaneously in different tanks, so it is possible to start mashing new quantities of malt even before the wort is transferred from the kettle to the fermentation tank (knockout). Therefore, the total time required to complete two batches is greatly reduced. Therefore, if you are performing multiple brewing processes at the same time, make sure you know how many batches the brewery can produce every day.

3) Number of fermentation tanks to be disposed

There is a big difference between the capacity of a brewhouse and a brewery. If there is no suitable number of storage units, then a large-capacity brewery is useless, which ultimately determines the capacity of the brewery. You can only transfer as much wort as possible to the fermenter and maturation tank.

It takes about 3 to 4 weeks for the beer to mature, depending on the type of beer.

Mash tun, Lauter Tun, Kettle and Whirlpool are included in a typical four-vessels brewhouse. Every tank is dedicated to performing a single process,and its design is different from similar vessels used to perform multiple processes.

Mash Tun in the four vessels system is a simple tank, but has several important features. The size of the steam jacket and the heating surface area is critical to obtain the ability to step temperature mash and evenly heat the entire mash. Another important consideration is to achieve the aspect ratio, which allows efficient heating and mixing of the mash during thermal cycling.

The dedicated Lauter barrel should be large enough to efficiently process the most commonly used brewing recipes, and small enough to brew clear wort with the lowest strength beer. The large diameter of these containers will help keep the depth of the grain bed at the most efficient level of product supply. According to the diameter, Lauter Tun will have a sufficient number of discharge ports to uniformly discharge the syrup bed. The mobile rake is a mandatory requirement for the dedicated Lauter tun, allowing the brewer to lift the rake so that it only cuts into the top of the valley. This improves mechanical flushing and efficiency during spraying without reducing transparency.

There is a dedicated kettle that can use the internal tube arranging device, which is the most effective kettle design. The internal tube rack not only provides better heating, but also provides incredible wort agitation to drive out unnecessary volatiles. The bottom steam jacket is used with the tube container, and its function is to start heating the wort before the kettle is filled to use the tube container.

The whirlpool design in a four container brewery is much wider than the combined container alternative.A 2:1 aspect ratio (Diameter to Fluid Depth) are essential for correct tube separation. A higher aspect ratio will only improve the separation process of wort grains, which may be necessary for Breweries with heavy hops load. Adding a cooling jacket to whirlpool allows you to reduce wort below DMS formation temperature very quickly, so that you can better separate solids and connect Connect to HLT to recover hot water.

In short, four vessels brewhouse provides the most versatility and highest throughput. With proper container sizes, well-arranged hard pipes, and well-designed control devices, these beer vessles can be very large, requiring only one person to operate. The ability to produce more beer with less labor input, coupled with improved efficiency and quality control, makes the four vessles brewery a nice investment for breweries that going to produce large amounts of beer.

Two vessels and three vessels systems are usually used in brew pub operations or small brewery operations. They can produce high-quality beer and it is a good choice for cost-sensitive customers. With these combined vessels systems, it may be more difficult to exceed a certain output growth. They need more labor to operate in order to achieve higher output, and the lack of the efficiency of the four vessels system makes the profit of producing more beer lower.

Whether you think the two container system or the four container system is suitable for your business plan, the next step is to resize the brewhouse vessels correctly. In order to make it accurately, it is important to have a firm idea of the beer type you want to brew and the batched you want to brew per day.