How to Choose a Brewhouse | Traditional Brewhouses vs Steam Brewhouses vs Oil Brewhouses

Hello. My name's Colin Kaminski. I'm with M.B. Pro, and today we're going to be talking about brewhouse types and specifically the oil brewhouse. I started brewing on a direct fire seven barrel system in 1998. The system had been installed in 1984, so it was almost vintage by the time I got to it. I started working for more beer about the same time I was doing both jobs.

 

I was brewing and designing equipment for more beer, and I designed two, three and a half barrel Direct Fire Brewhouse Forum, but it never really went to market. We sold it to South America, but the consensus was it was too small and nobody would ever want to brew one three and a half barrels. And now we have lots of breweries running on one barrel system, so would have been perfect for today's market.

 

I did about 1200 batches in 15 years as a one man department. While I was at downtown Joe's, now I designed pro tanks and brew houses for more beer under the ME brand, and I've been doing it for the last five years. I've drawn and constructed between one and 120 barrel fermenters and Bright's. I've done a three and a half barrel and a seven barrel electric system, and we've been working on the 2 to 10 barrel oil heated.

 

As a partner company, the main brew house types are direct fire, which means there's gas on the bottom and that's heating everything from the bottom electric where we have an immersion element that's going in, heating the work directly, steam fired where we've got a jacket on the bottom and on the sides that is heating. Usually our steam under about five psi and maybe maybe a little more.

 

And then oil fired where we're circular. We have a jacket like the steam fired. But we're using hotter oil. We're using I like to run about 260 degree oil. Factors to consider when choosing a brewhouse. Well, obviously, money is one of them. But you need to remember this is a choice you're going to live with for a long time.

 

And swapping brew houses isn't cheap. There's lots of infrastructure that goes along with it. And you want to consider, you know, the floor space. This guy didn't do a very good job of figuring out how to get a couch in his car. And you don't want to be that person that's not quite thought of all the details. So offsets from the walls, especially with direct fire.

 

You will have a certain code restriction depending on your building materials, how far you need to have your kettles away from the walls. Even with a brick wall, they're not going to let you go directly against a working space. Observers, especially when you get older. Brewers kind of big and we need room to get around and throw hoses around and not trip over things.

 

Tripping is one of the in fact, it is the number one cause of injuries in a brewery and expansion. You know, if you if you think, well, gosh, I console three and a half barrels a week now, so I'm never going to really need to sell more than 14 barrels a week. I can I can just brew four times a week.

 

It's not going to be a problem. But maybe, maybe you will need more room, maybe you will need more expansion. And that's something to think about when you're designing your brewery and also when you're picking your building. Your production needs now into the future. They're really hard to forecast, but it's worth taking the time and doing the best job you can with the labor as a reoccurring cost.

 

In fact, it's one of the major costs in a brewery is labor and your brewhouse directly influences how much labor it takes to brew. Is it easy to clean? Is it just batch size? Right? It's for one man. I can brew a 15 barrel batch by myself in the same amount of time. I can brew a seven barrel batch by myself.

 

So getting that sorted out early on is really good. There's lots of times when I was doing 100 to 110 batches a year on my seven barrel system that I really would have liked to have a 15 barrel capital costs. A purchase price is what most people think about is the cost of a brewhouse. But it's not the only thing to consider.

 

You know, when you see that price tag, it's 999. Well, there's lots of additional things that are going to go that are going to get added to that. And a lot of these costs aren't going to be recoverable. The electrical installation that you do for an electric brewhouse is probably going to be left behind with the lease, most of it.

 

This beautiful control panel here you'd probably take with you. But all the wire that ran out to it is going to stay and that electrician's labor is going to stay. If you're doing direct fire, then you've got a big gas line. I was running a four inch main, which cost us about $30,000 to get installed by the time we had PGE and put in a larger meter and all the things that we had.

 

If you run on propane, which a lot of people in rural areas do, you've got to worry about the propane tank freezing. You're going to be pulling a lot of gas out of it. More gas. You pull the cold out of that tank, it's you're out there on a, you know, 20 degree day demanding everything you can out of your propane tank and you can freeze it.

 

The only solution for that is to get a larger tank. And at some point that becomes cost prohibitive. Flues. You're going to four gas kettles, you're going to run flues out through the ceiling. And that's not so bad if you're in a warehouse. But it can be quite problematic if you're in a bottom of an opera house. Friend of mine put an electric brewery in the bottom of an opera house because there was no way for him to get a flu outside.

 

It was the opera House was four floors above him and then floors and drains. Having a slope floor to a nice drain is just absolutely beautiful. Makes cleaning a lot easier, is going to save you a bunch of labor. But if you go ahead and move in two years, that's not going to be very cost effective. Location restrictions.

 

Can you penetrate the roof? Do you have access to gas? Some some breweries don't even have a city gas line to work with. So you would be on propane. Do you have enough electrical supply for an electrical system? I get these calls all the time. Oh, well, what about a 15 barrel brewhouse? And then when they look at the electrical requirements that are that are involved, it's more expensive for them to bring power in than it is to choose another brewhouse.

 

Sanitation is one of the things a lot of people don't consider at all. But the city is going to be really upset with you. Your septic system is going to be really upset with you, especially if you start putting yeast and crude down the drain. Lots of body in those things. So you're going to figure out how to recover it.

 

You're going to have to work with the city. Hopefully they don't make you put in a body meter, but I see that more and more now. Water a brewhouse uses anywhere from 1.5 gallons of water to eight gallons of water per gallon of beer brewed. That's a huge water requirement. You know, you think, oh, well, I'll just use 1.5 gallons.

 

Well, the only people I hear of doing that are people that have invested literally millions of dollars into saving water because it's that important. Sierra Nevada up in Chico last I talked to them, they're running 1.4 gallons of water for every gallon of water brewed. And they're doing that with lots of instrumentation. They're measuring the patch of every rinse so they can cut it off early.

 

They're doing a lot of things that small brewer is just not going to do. I feel I'm lucky if I'm doing 6 to 8 gallons in the seven barrel brewhouse. Heating costs. You know, when you go to heat up all that water and boil your beer, that's can be really expensive. But I figure it's about a third of the costs.

 

And in a brew pub environment, some haven't really done the math for a production environment where or where we're bottling everything. The energy costs in the U.S. can vary. Natural gas at 85%, efficiency is about a third. The cost of electric resistance, heating for most of the U.S. Now, this really depends on where you are. If you're, you know, a block from the Grand Coulee Dam or you have some other access to hydroelectric, solar wind, you might do better than that.

 

Propane and electric are usually comparable. So that gives you an idea of how expensive propane is compared to natural gas. Geothermal and heat pumps would be a very innovative way if your local to geothermal activity maintenance costs. It's another thing people don't consider. They're like, Oh, well, I bought it, it should run forever. But that's not the case.

 

You know, you're in a production environment, you're you're pushing a lot of product through a system and it's going to have its maintenance costs. You know, this burner looks really beautiful, but this burners in desperate need of maintenance here. And that's something that you can try to push off and push off. But you're efficiency is going to drop down.

 

The kettle's going to sort those yellow flames or something that needs to be dealt with. So some of the maintenance costs are cleaning burner jets, cleaning flues, sitting on the kettles, boiler water chemistry. If you're doing steam boiler water chemistry or something, you don't want to let get away from you. And a lot of brewers will do it themselves.

 

A lot of brewers bring in a monthly consultant that comes in and does it for them. Even if you're doing it yourself, it's probably good to have a check up periodically, at least yearly, unless you're water chemistry expert in boiler water chemistry, cleaning electrical elements is very labor intensive. You have to clean them every batch in the oil systems.

 

We replace the oil about every three years, depending on the number of batches you do in three years. And that can be very expensive. Repair costs components have a limited life. Jets wear out. I can clean my jets for about ten years and then I have to swap 88 jets at about $7 each. That adds up. Flues need replacement.

 

They rushed out from the inside. Any time you're burning fossil fuels, you're generating a lot of water. The rule of thumb for gas engines, which is on the top of my head, is you produce seven gallons of water for every gallon of gasoline. And and you see similar numbers with propane and natural gas controls where out especially relays and things like that.

 

Gas safety systems, it's always good to have spares around. You don't want to lose a flame sensor right in the middle of a boil and have to lose a batch of beer in steam systems. Your piping can foul and that can either be minor or where the piping is fouled with something that you can chemically clean like carbon or like carbonates, or it can be something more complicated like silicates that can't be etched out even with nitric acid, electric elements can fail.

 

Absolutely terrible. If you have an electric element, fill on the middle of a batch of beer because you can't replace it without emptying the kettle. If you had a spare, you would pump over into a spare vessel or repair the kettle, pump back over and start boiling again. And then the other thing that breweries run into is repair skill.

 

If you're in a small town in the middle of nowhere, you're not going to find anybody nearby that has training in burner safety, safety controls unless you're very lucky. And so that's either something you're going to have to learn yourself or something. You're going to have to develop the skill. And in a local person. But it is a very important thing because you don't want to stop the you don't want to stop a batch.

 

But more importantly, you don't want to be down for a couple of weeks waiting for somebody direct fires. The first thing we're going to talk about and again, this is where we've got the heat at the bottom of the kettle. This image here is the seven barrel system that I worked on. It was custom designed in 1986, was commissioned in 1988 as Willits Brewing.

 

These copper kettles were all hand fabricated. Those burners are 600,000 BTUs, 88 jet solar flow burners. And this system's worked out very well for Willits. And then when? Well, it sold to downtown Joe's for Downtown Joe's. The advantages of it are fast heating. As long as you designed the burner to match your system correctly, it's easy to adjust the boil rate when you dial in the gas flow.

 

00;13;29;24 - 00;13;57;24

Unknown

The boil rate is set, and every day when you turn it on, it stays the same until sitting has fouled the burner. It's familiar to anybody who's home brewed, which which actually is a big advantage for some people running this system is much like running a home brew gas system, low capital costs for the most part. It's not super expensive to get direct fire brewery installed and running disadvantages or the large gas line that's required.

 

We've talked about gas safety systems. Take some expertise. Once you have an engineer, design it, then you need somebody trained to maintain it. Large flues, you can see in this system it looks like those the big silver gas flues, they're huge. Those are triple wall flues that allow us to save some room and get those kettles closer to the tile than code would have allowed us with double wall.

 

There's a maximum boil volume that you can do without having a firebox. So Firebox is where you set the kettle down in the end of the burner and the gas actually goes up the sides of the kettle as well. With the firebox, I've seen kettles as large as 20 barrels, but they're they're complicated to design and run, very difficult to remove the kettle for maintenance without a hoist or a lift or a crane or something.

 

You're not going to be able to get the kettle out of the of the firebox electric. Well, boy, Electrics, for sure. One of the easiest things to get running on, you have no gas flue so you can put them in a bottom floor. There's low capital costs. It's very affordable to get installed. You're going to pay your electrician a one time fee of getting it hooked up.

 

But that's not too bad. Some of that is recoverable if you need to move. Disadvantages is the immersion elements scorched the work and are difficult to clean. You know that the scorching and the cleaning goes hand in hand. The wiring runs are large gauge wire, which adds up an expense. If you're ten feet from your panel, that's not a big deal.

 

But if you've got to go 100 feet or more, that wire being zero gauge for a seven barrel system or or even even bigger starts to add up really fast. The code requires you to have enough power to have all the elements on at once, even if you're not going to use them all at once. They don't just say, Oh, well, just don't turn that on and turn this on.

 

If you can possibly turn it all on at once, you have to have enough power there to do that. And that can increase the size of the wiring needed compared to a more efficient method of using heat boy steam system specific mechanical. I stole the image off their website without asking, so hopefully they don't mind me advertising their system here.

 

This is a beautiful system that they make. The advantages are large area of heating. You've got you've got steam running on the floor, the kettles, you've got steam running and the walls of the kettles and the temperature of the steam is very close to the temperature of of your water. So there's not any scorching. It's easy to clean.

 

You're not getting a lot of protein coming out of the system and getting cooked on to the walls. The evaporation rate is very adjustable and a small change just happens instantly in your evaporation rate. They're easy to clean because that protein doesn't get cooked on. There's no gas flues on the kettles, but you are going to have a flue on the boiler and that boiler because steam transmits heat so efficiently, the boiler can be removed to a side room or even a an outside room if you need to.

 

The disadvantages or the high capital costs of getting a boiler installed takes a special person to get a boiler installed and fill the pipe, get all the steam over boilers. Safety is something that everybody needs to be trained on. You do hear of boiler explosions, mostly in apartment building heating, but but also in breweries. You need that pipefitter to get in to make any changes to do the installation water chemistry upkeep can be a challenge for a brewer who's not specifically trained in that.

 

And scaling the the water system is also something that has to be done periodically. Oil systems are really what I'm here to talk about. And one of the main advantages is that it's a medium capital cost. While it's a little bit more expensive than electric brewery, it's not anywhere near as expensive as a steam system to get installed.

 

You have the same large jacketed area that you would have in a steam system. You can adjust the evaporation rate by controlling your oil temperature and you only have one oil vessel that's going to pump energy into all the vessels. And the nice thing about that is you can run with about half the installed heating elements that you really have to do for an electric system.

 

So your electric install is going to be going to be less expensive. There's no contact between the high temp elements and the product, so you don't have to clean the elements. Cleaning the kettles is much easier. You don't have any scorching off flavors that can go on with electric elements. There's no gas flue, there's no boil water chemistry, and it's very easy to heat the mash just like a steam system.

 

The disadvantages, It's a little bit harder to clean the walls of the kettles. You'll see a little bit of protein, but not burning proteins. You just see some white proteins that stick to the heating jacket on the inside of the kettles. They slip out really well, but it's something to pay attention to the oil life and cost. You're running a food grade oil, a food grade thermal transfer oil, and it is relatively expensive, depending on the size of your system, it can be anywhere from $250 to $1000 every three years to replace.

 

You can tell that your oil needs to be replaced because your your thermal transfer efficiency starts to go down as it degrades. Here's the ME oil system and we've had a really good time working on this. It's been a good collaboration. I've gotten to brew on a two barrel one of these a lot while we were doing prototyping and and figuring out exactly what we needed.

 

We we make it between two barrels and ten barrels. It's a very small footprint. This five barrel system that I'm showing in this drawing comes in on a skid, which is absolutely amazing. You just pull it out of the crate. It's got some casters that you can roll it into position, take the casters off, set it down and and hook up electrical and water.

 

You're ready to brew. Ah, it's very easy to clean the recipe everywhere you need Skippy. The the colors here are showing us where the the piping is. Well I'm a final laser pointer and a way to do that. I would show you all of that. There's insulated vessels which really helps a lot for energy efficiency. It makes the environment for the brewer cooler to work in.

 

It requires less heat to get everything hot. There's a large hot liquor tank, which is really helpful if you're wanting to do some sip while you're cleaning or while you're while you're brewing, which can be done. Or if you want to double batch, it gives you a good head start on your second batch. There's a timer so that you can have the hot liquor ready to brew.

 

So, you know, if you have it set to turn on before you get there in the morning, when you get there in the morning, you've got a hot liquor ready to brew with. And that's one of the big advantages of of having timers is being ready to brew right when you walk in the door, it's quick heating. When you come out of MASH and go to go to boil at the end of later, it's very quick to heat up.

 

The evaporation rate is very adjustable. The processes are very logical. When you when you think about the system, you think about it just like you would a home brew system. There's a manifold underneath that's permanently plumbed. So you're not dragging hoses around like I used to have to do on the seven barrel system. I was dragging pumps and hoses everywhere all day long.

 

When you get old like me, you'll appreciate your back hand and all that dragging around is for young guys. There's spray bottles that just go everywhere. There's you can see in the boil kettle here that there's a condenser flue that's running the condensate down to the ground. There's a sippy ball in the top of that that cleans there's a capable in the hot liquor in the mash as well as in the boil kettle, the heat exchangers attached on here.

 

So you can just knock straight out through the heat exchanger, connect straight from the skin off into your fermenter and be ready to pitch yeast. Also, we have U.S. technical support for for this product, which can make life a lot easier if you're working with German or Chinese technical support, the timezone difference can be a big problem. I'm going to take a breath on the installation.

 

This is, like I said in the initial introduction, there is a skid moment. The skid is installed and removed easily. So if you go and your lease expires and you've got to move to a different building, you just drag the skid out and and put it in your new spot. We're showing the back side of the system here now.

 

And you can see the the heated oil tank there in the back. That's where all your energy, all the electricity is converted and the heat and all the heat gets pumped around to the different vessels as needed. There's a single electrical connection, a single water connection, a single drain outlet, which you can just run to the floor if you have a fluid drain.

 

And there's a steam condenser that we talked about. The circuit includes a control panel, an oil heater, mash and boil pumps mash. And the skid includes a control panel, an oil heater, mash kettle, boil kettle pumps and the heat exchanger. It also includes the hl t on the skid for size as five barrels and up and the hl t is off the skid for seven and ten barrel sizes.

 

And that's really for moving and shipping convenience on the seven and ten barrel sizes. We just end up being too long to be convenient. You can also order this as a two vessel system with no hot liquor if you want to use it as a pilot. Brewhouse and you already have hot liquor in the main brewhouse, what is a brew day like?

 

Well, it's pretty much like a brew day that you're familiar with. You make up your water and this is going to be your plug for doing your water chemistry here. Make up your water in the morning, Do whatever analysis you need to do to figure out what's in your hot liquor, drink, make your adjustments, you mash in if you have a rake.

 

That mashing in is as simple as getting water and grain running into the formation and and stirring them all. You go at the end of MASH, you lotter, there's plenty of hot water, so you can just keep slaughtering over. You run your boil while you're boiling. There's enough hard piping that you can start cleaning the mash behind you, which saves you a lot of cleaning.

 

At the end of the day, when you go to knock out, you've got the heat exchanger right there. You can this all systems come standard with a two stage heat exchanger, so you can run tap water in one side that gets collected into the hot liquor tank and you can run chilled liquor on the other side or you can connect them together and just run tap water through both stages.

 

Or when you go to clean the mash, if you have the rakes, the you can flip the rakes up so that they push the grain off the door, which is very convenient. You clean the boiler, you can clean the mash before you've done boil. Once you're out of the boil kettle, you can clean the boil, you clean the condenser, and then you copy the heat exchanger and you're ready for the next batch.

 

I'm Colin Kaminski with MoreBeer! Pro. And thank you for your time.