Nano Brewery Build

I have the opportunity to design a nano brewery (150L/40Gal) for a restaurant. The idea being to brew and sell on premises. I’ve done the math and figure a 150L/40 gallon setup will suit the requirements. I am a home brewer at heart so I am approaching this as giant home brew setup. The plan is to build a single tier system using 2 pumps and 2 gas burners for heating (HLT + Kettle), and a gaint imerssion chiller to cool.

I live in Peru so buying an off the shelf system or 3 Blichmann pots and a couple of conical fermenters isn’t an option. The upside of living down here is that getting stuff fabricated is much cheaper. So the plan is to have following fabricated in stainless steel:
HLT – 200L / 50 Gallon
Mash Tun – 200L / 50 Gallon
Boil Kettle – 250L / 66 Gallon
Fermenters – 180L / 47 Gallon

Now as I am going to have the HLT/Mash Tun/Kettle/Fermenters fabricated I have a few design questions:

Any and all advise/suggestions/comments are welcome.

Cheers
Zac

I'm not the guy to answer this because I have the same basic questions. How does one properly design all the pots. There's gotta be a math equation or ratio.

I would look at all the commercial brewing rigs available on the market, read up and measure their height to diameter ratios of their kettles and use that ratio to the scale or gallons your looking to build. This should be an easy one with all this found on line. This plus remember keggles but they were handy and made to fit our needs. larger the surface area the more and higher the evaporation rate over time. With my last keggles they had 10" holes for the lids not 12" that seems the standard diameter. I saw this as 113 sq/in vs 78.54 sq/in or 69% of exposed area from 10" vs 12" for a reduced evaporation rate during the boil with more for the fermenter. I haven't noticed a difference boiling with each different diameter boil keggle opening with the same end product called bier and this with splitting the same batch.

NECRO-THREAD! Wondering if this ever turned into something. What did you end up doing, Cuzco_Brew?

Necro bump indeed. We ended up getting a 2BBL system built here. It's a two vessel no sparge setup, Mash Tun and Boil Kettle. We have a fermenter big enough to hold about 4BBL, so we brew twice to fill it. Eventually we switch to a sparge system, the boil kettle and mash tun are oversized to handle 4BBL batches so it will only require the addition of a HLT. And maybe a bigger burner to handle the increased load of bring 4BBL of wort to the boil.

Currently looking at getting a pair of 500L fermenters to take production up a notch. All going very well.

Nice- how are you chilling down your batches? That's my latest stumbling block as I don't particularly want to redesign all my recipes for a big hopstand/whirlpool addition.

I am using CFC, this one from MoreBeer. The ground water here is around 13C and I have a second home made CFC hooked up to the glycol tank that I can use if need be. I normally send it to the fermenter at about 20C or so and let the Glycol jacket take it down the last degree or two.

Thanks for the incredibly fast replies, btw. That sounds great. Do you recirculate into the kettle to get the bulk temperature down before going to the fermenters, or do you just have a big hopstand/whirlpool addition so you can drain your kettle slowly.?

I whirlpool in the kettle. Was doing that as a home brewer so designed the system to be able to do it the same way. Works fairly well, I tried using the trub filter from Brewers Hardware with this setup, but found it clogged quickly. I don't think it was designed to handle that big of a hop/trub load. One of the reasons I went with the CFC over a plate chiller was I concerned about getting hops or gunk in the plate chiller and not being able to get it clean. I may look at adding a second CFC to the setup, will need the extra cooling power when I step the batch sizes to 4BBL. Or I might have to change to a Plate Chiller.

Hop socks, or a prefilter. Only way I've found to prevent it if you do whirlpoolling