Brewery Service

How to Take The Heat Off Your Craft Brewing Costs

As you start to plan out your new brewery, there are several important considerations and heat is one of them. Heat plays a particularly important role in the craft brewing process. Every time you heat something up it requires a healthy dose of energy. Cooling things down will then require more energy. How can you do both efficiently?

An efficient process is to use a plate type heat exchanger called a “knockout,” common on most brewing systems. This is a highly efficient device with lots of heat transfer area to effectively remove all that heat and put it somewhere useful. The knockout heat exchanger uses a counterflow plate and frame design that allows for efficient heat transfer from the hot wort to the cooling medium, which is usually water. The design of the knockout heat exchanger consists of a series of plates placed inside a single expandable frame. The hot wort is passed over one side of the plates while the cooling water is passed over the other side. This allows the heat from the wort to be transferred to the cooling water. The heated water returning as hot liquor will never be hotter than the wort entering. It will require additional heating before being used as “hot liquor”. Similarly, cold water entering must be cooler than the wort leaving.

A Stack Condenser can help save even more energy costs.After bringing your hot liquor up to strike temperature, you will need to heat wort up to boiling temperature and continue heating until a certain amount of water has boiled off and any off-flavor have been removed. All this heat goes out the stack in the roof as hot vapor. 

Instead of installing costly stacks through your roof, a stack condenser device recovers that heat by circulating cooler water inside pipes that hot vapor condenses on. The stack helps condense the steam generated during the boil and recover thermal energy from this steam. It typically uses a shell and tube heat exchanger design to transfer heat from the steam to a cooling medium, usually potable water. The stack condenser’s shell and tube design consists of a series of narrow tubes placed inside a cylindrical shell. The steam from the boil kettle is forced around these tubes from a fan. As the heat from the steam is transferred to the cooling water that is flowing outside the tubes, the thermal energy is recovered. This now hot water is pumped into the hot liquor tank for later use.

While not common on small brewing systems, the stack condenser can be incredibly powerful. In addition to the pluses noted above, the stack condenser helps to remove dimethyl sulfide (DMS) from the wort, a compound that many brewers want to eliminate. It is for this reason that the condensate (steam) is drained to the floor, rather than used in the beer itself.

The circulating water used in the condensate stack returns to the hot liquor tank at much hotter temperatures than the knockout heat exchanger. Just as with the “knockout” – the surface area and cooling water must be sufficient.  And just like the “knockout” too much cooling water can be wasteful.

Some final thoughts on heating in the brewery process. Adding heat recovery devices such as a knockout or stack condenser certainly helps you save on your heating costs. When installing a stack condenser be sure to carefully monitor how much water you use and predict how much you will make. And remember, don’t forget to account for the cost to cool the water you use in these devices. Automation and awareness are key. Proper automation of these devices ensures cold water doesn’t make it back to the hot liquor tank. Relying on data logging to ensure automation is tuned to balance the cost of making cold liquor and savings from recovering heat is optimal.

Both the stack condenser and knockout heat exchanger are crucial components in the brewhouse that help to make the brewing process more sustainable and energy efficient. By recapturing thermal energy, reducing energy consumption, and ensuring consistent beer quality, these devices help to make the brewing process more environmentally friendly while also improving the overall efficiency of the operation.

If you are planning to open a brewery. TIANTAI BrewTech could help you answer your questions and supply the brewery equipment system. We supply 2-150bbl complete beer brewing brewery equipment system including malt milling equipment, brewhouse equipment, fermenters, brite beer tanks, beer bottling machine,beer canning machine, beer kegging machine, hopping machine, yeast propagation equipment. We also supply all auxiliary brewery systems like steam heating pipe and valves, water treatment, filter, air compressor etc. Everything in brewery are all in our list.

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