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How to Build a Glycol Chiller for a Commercial Brewery
If you are building a commercial scale brewery, or even a large home brewery, you may want to build your own glycol chiller to control the temperature of your fermenter. Building your own brewery from old stainless steel dairy tanks and other stainless tanks and vessels is the new fad.
Sam Calagione, owner of the famous Dogfish Head Brewery started his company brewing beer on a homebrew system. He brewed batch after batch on a ten gallon brew sculpture, but I guess all good things must come to an end.
Sam searched high and low looking for old stainless steel tanks that he could modify into a commercial scale brew system. You need a mash / lauder tun, brew kettle, fermenter, grant, hot liquor tank and other pieces of equipment. Once you get the tanks they need to be modified to make them functional as a brewery.
I thought the glycol chiller I saw on the FrankenBrew DVD was just too cool. Tom Hennessy put out this video back in 1995 and he shows you how to build one out of regular copper tubing. He cut equal lengths of copper tubing that would wrap around the outside of the stainless fermenter, cutting them short enough to add a manifold at each end. It is difficult to explain without illustrations, so I will just get to the basic concept.
Tom spaced the copper tubing about 5 inches apart and once the ends were connected to a manifold made of copper tubing--he wrapped the assembled copper chiller around the fermenter and tightened it up. You need to tap the tubing against the side of the fermenter to flatten the tubing a little against the side of the fermenter making more of the copper surface come in contact with the surface of the fermenter.
The more surface contact between the tubing and the fermenter the better. You need contact between the tubing and fermenter to transfer the heat from the fermenter to the cold glycol circulating through the copper tubing. Be careful not to flatten out the tubing too much. Once you finish tapping all the tubing you need to retighten the chiller again. Then add a layer
Glycol chillers are used by most commercial breweries, but some smaller breweries put their fermenters in walk-in coolers. They keep the cooler temperature of the thermostat at the appropriate temperature setting to ferment the beer at the desired temperature. Normally ales ferment in the 60's Fahrenheit and lagers ferment in the 50's. Some Belgian ales ferment in the 70's. As a home brewer I am considering using the non-poisonous red antifreeze, or even a brine solution instead of glycol. I will have a reservoir and a copper coil mounted in a deep freeze to chill the liquid down and then install a pump to pump the chilled liquid through the chiller. A temperature controller will turn the pump on when the fermenting beer warms up and the circulating antifreeze will keep it cool.
There were countless ideas and this is just one I got from watching Tom Hennessy's FrankenBrew DVD. If you are a home brewer, commercial brewer, or wanting to learn more about commercial brew systems, then it will be worth purchasing the DVD for yourself. I tried to explain, but a video is worth more words than I can type. I want to thank Tom Hennessy for making this video. He explains every step of commercial brewing and shows you how to build the brewing equipment yourself. I wonder how many new micro-breweries we will get because of Frankenbrew?
About the Author John B McKissack III, (aka Johnny Max) produces and hosts the podcast BrewCrAzY. For more information about starting your own Craft, or Micro-Brewery go to the source, the original FrankenBrew
DVD.
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