In a microbrewery, a suitable cooling system is necessary and very important. Many customers emailed me with some doubts they have to the cooling system for their brewery plant. So we would like to share our opinions here, hoping they bring your some useful ideas to your brewery plant. Ok, let’s begin.
 
1. Here are usually two alternatives for the cooling system for microbrewery:
The first option include 1xglycol water tank, chiller, pumps.
The chillers cool the glycol water tank, and then the glycol water tank cool the fermentation tanks/BBTs and wort.
At this time, the glycol tank is normally 2-3 times bigger than the brewhouse, as the glycol tank also need to cool the wort via the plate heat exchanger within short time (30-40 minutes).
So glycol water tank needs to store the enough coolant in advance.
This is our standard configuration now for brewery below 2000L.
 
2. The second option include 1xGWT, 1xCWT, chiller, pumps.
The chillers cool the GWT, and then the GWT cool the FV/BBTs and CLT,and then CLT cool the wort independently.
At this time, the GWT can be smaller as it will just cool the FV/BBTs/CLT who DO NOT need the coolant in very short time ,
but the CLT should be 2-3 times bigger than the brewhouse to cool the wort quickly.
 
Advantage of this option:
For bigger system, it is more necessary to pay more attention on the safe quality of wort, as the wort amount is so large. So a suitable CLT is more necessary than smaller brewhouse to ensure the safety of the wort. So once here is any unknown leakage in the plate heat exhanger(some brewmaster may disconnect the plates to clean completely, then the plates may be not completely sealed after re-assembly etc.), we do not need to throw out all the wort as only the clean cold water rather than glycol is mixed into the wort, we may just get lower alcohol beer.
 
Shortage:
Require extra cost for CLT.
 
3. The third options in microbrewery USA
Some breweries in USA just use a big chiller come along with a tiny GLYCOL TANK (probably 100l maximum), as the chiller just cool the FV, will not cool the wort (At this time, an additional cold water tank will be required to cool the wort quickly.) Since here is no big GWT to store the enough coolant capacity in advance, the chiller usually keeps work to cool the FV INLINE and also the chiller capacity is usually much bigger. For this kind of big capacity chiller, we recommend to get it from USA whose quality and technology is much better than the one in China.
 
 
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions for building your own brewery or anything we can help with your existing brewery during brewing.
 
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