No one understands your brewhouse more than you as a brewer. With layouts always being configured to work to what’s best for your flow, sometimes creating your own “equipment” of sorts can be a time- or money-saving effort. But sometimes just plopping down the cash for a piece of equipment to help create consistency and quality matters just as much.
Here are some solutions, be they purchases or created equipment, that have breweries humming along.
Multiple Functionalities
Brendan Arnold, the Head Brewer for Alternate Ending, said that purchasing a portable 8-barrel Grundy tank has been great for fruiting, blending barrel-aged beers while it can also be used as a single-wall serving tank or bottling tank.
“It’s great when you have that kind of versatility in the brewery,” Arnold said.
A ‘Priceless’ Purchase
The most indispensable piece of equipment that has drastically improved product quality and consistency at BarrelHouse Brewing is a dissolved oxygen (DO) meter.
Brewmaster George Numair told Brewer that for under $200, a Milwaukee MW600 is priceless to have on hand.
“We have found that depending on what fermenter we are cooling into, we were seeing varying amounts of DO getting locked into solution since the farther the wort has to travel, the more it gets absorbed,” he said. This led to fears of a stalled fermentation if we had too little DO upon pitching or a fermentation going too fast if we had too much, which could lead to slightly sharp and/or acidic flavors as well as a hotter alcohol aroma.
“The DO meter helps to ensure we’re hitting our target, so we can nail our flavor profile, which makes for delicious beer and happy customers.”
READ MORE: What You Need Around Your Brewhouse
DIY It!
Sometimes, the best equipment used doesn’t have a model number.
Hop & Sting co-founder Brian Burton said one piece of equipment that he didn’t buy, but has been really useful for him is a bent piece of all-thread.
“I use it to drag pallets of cans around or to hook things that I cannot reach with my hand,” he explained.
Layton Cutler said a similar “life-hack” is at Angel City. The brewery has some large and long horizontal lagering tanks that are unsafe to climb in and sometimes they use them for conditioning beer with special ingredients and/or spices.
The ingredients go into mesh bags and sit in the tanks with beer for a few days to a week.
“Once we get the beer out of the tank, the bags stay in and can be challenging to get out, so one of our brewers found a very long piece of copper piping with a bend at the end that he uses to get the bags out of the tank,” Cutler said. “It works great!”
Arnold said that at Alternate Ending, he designed 1.5” Tri Clover extensions that mount through the brewery’s cooler wall.
“[It] makes transfers to serving tanks and canning runs a breeze and you can keep the cooler door closed,” he explained.
Photo courtesy Alternate Ending Beer Co.
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