Ordering a Brewhouse

It will come as no surprise that the key purchase you make when setting up a brewery is the brewhouse itself (including the cellar side, fermentation vessels (FVs), brite tanks etc.). Therefore, as you would expect I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what I want and who to go to for it.

I have chosen to work with Bespoke Brewing Solutions to manufacture the brewhouse. I have worked with them before so I know they are able to produce excellent quality equipment, great service and provide exceptional value for money. Over the last 8 months or so I have been working closely with them to design a fully customised brewhouse, all to my specifications and to suit my chosen site. Every time I have spoken to them they have been very helpful and accommodating with my requirements (and I have had some very niche ones), so I am very excited to be working with them to deliver their first 4-vessel brewhouse!

What is a 4-vessel brewhouse you ask? Well first let me cover what options you typically have and why you would or wouldn’t choose them. The brewhouse needs to perform the following steps to make the wort which we then turn into beer. Typically, there are 3 necessary steps in the process with a final optional 4^th step. These are:

1. Mashing (done in a mash tun)
2. Lautering (done in a lauter tun)
3. Boiling (done in a kettle)
4. Clarification (done in a whirlpool or hop back) – Optional

I won’t cover the actual brewing process or what happens in each step because there are many books and websites that can do a far better job explaining this than I can.

A 2-vessel system is typically a combined mash/lauter tun as the first vessel and a combined kettle/whirlpool as the second. Or if you have a slightly fancier setup a combined mash/kettle/whirlpool and a separate lauter tun but either way, it is as it sounds – 2 vessels.

These systems are very common for small breweries, especially so in little brewpub type setups. If you don’t intend on doing more than one brew per day or you are limited on space and budget, then this is a good choice.

A 3-vessel system has three common formats. One is a combined mash/lauter tun, separate kettle and sperate whirlpool. One is a combined mash/kettle, separate lauter tun and separate whirlpool. And the last one is sperate mash tun, separate lauter tun and combined kettle/whirlpool.

Once a brewery hits a certain size, it makes sense to brew the target amount of beer by brewing more times per day on a smaller sized 3-vessel system than less times on a larger 2-vessel system. It allows flexibility in the schedule and gives the brewer the ability to adjust any errors in gravity there may be from the first turn (brew) of the day. This also allows the brewery to get either small FVs and brew once to fill or larger FVs and fill them by double or triple brewing into them. Either way it is possible to do all of this in a single day.

A 4-vessel system as you may have guessed by now, is where all these stages are separate. Separate mash tun, separate lauter tun, separate kettle and sperate whirlpool.

4-vessel breweries are a great choice for modern brewing, especially considering how the use of hot side hopping has changed over recent years with most of it going into the whirlpool as opposed to the kettle. Having separate vessels for each step gives the greatest flexibility on what you can do with it. One example of this for modern hop forward styles is to whirlpool at cooler temperatures than boiling. There are a few ways of doing this but going from the kettle via a shell-and-tube or tube-in-tube heat exchanger to the whirlpool are great options (the latter is what I am going to do). It allows you it bring the temperature down very quickly without the risk of clogging your plate heat exchanger which I have unfortunately done more times that I would like. I’m sure there will be brewers out there reading this who have shared this pain.

There are other variants of these setups with dual kettles etc. but ultimately, they are all trying to achieve one or more of the associated advantages (given below).

A brewery with fewer hot side brewhouse vessels is cheaper to buy and install (less stainless steel, pumps, pipes etc.) which is obviously an attractive feature. Fewer vessels also mean the smallest physical brewery footprint which allows the brewery to be squeezed into a smaller space (again saving on cost – lower rent, business rates etc.). However, this comes with a couple of compromises. The fewer the vessels the more doubling up of functionality so the tank designs are not optimal as they must be able to do multiple steps in the brewing process. When you get to a certain size output your bottleneck becomes the number of brews per day you can achieve. The fewer the tanks the tighter that bottleneck and the fewer brews per day. Once you hit this maximum limit then it is an expensive upgrade to increase capacity.

On the other hand, a brewery with more hot side vessels is more expensive to buy and install (more stainless, pumps, pipes, etc.) and takes up more space on the brewery floor. The more you add, the more complex it becomes which can then impact the operability of the system. It may become difficult to use or to learn how to use adding even further cost to provide solutions to these difficulties. It also may increase maintenance and other associated costs. So why bother with all this? There are significant positives to outweigh the negatives. The more vessels you have the less compromise there is in the design as you can have tanks designed specifically for the step in the process they carry out which increases efficiency and the overall quality of the beer. You can also cascade the brews through the system. If the maximum step time (including transfer) in any one tank is 120 mins then technically you can start a batch every 120 mins! This means that the more brewhouse vessels you have the more beer you can produce in a single day without adding more or bigger equipment. You can start small and know you have lots of room for growth before having to purchase more expensive equipment.

The Azvex P&ID

I have placed the order for my brewhouse, the design is complete and is in manufacture so now it’s a waiting game. However, there is plenty of work to be getting on with in the meantime. I have been working with my chosen flooring supplier to lock in the details and costs. I have chosen and ordered a process heating boiler which has now completed manufacture and I have been working with the installer to make sure it integrates smoothly into the overall system. I will cover both flooring and heating in separate blogs as they are both equally as important as each other and depending on who you ask, also as important as the brewhouse itself!

The Azvex Brewery Layout – Notice just how much space the 4-vessel setup takes up!

Things are picking up pace now so the next update will come much, much quicker than this one did. Although there is still a little way to go, beer is now on the horizon! If you want to be first to hear when it becomes available, signup using the relevant link below.

Stay tuned, stay safe and please be patient!

Adam Henderson – Azvex Brewing Co.