Why Brite Tank?

Why do breweries use brite tanks? Why can't they just pressurize the fermenter after fermentation is done to carbonate the beer and then fill bottles/kegs directly from the fermenter?

Temperature is a concern. Your typical fermenter needs to run at 68-72, while you want your beer at 32 to get it to carb up properly. Additionally, commercial beer is meant to be as clear as possible, so the brite tank can be post filtration. Mostly, though, they're meant to be cold and hold pressure.

I beleive also the brite tank was a less complicated vessel so likely cheaper than the fermentor. By adding a brite tank for conditioning, it freed up the fermentor for another batch of beer without having to invest in additional fermentors.

This (10 char)

Zen_Brew said:

it freed up the fermentor for another batch of beer without having to invest in additional fermentors.

Click to expand...

Because most breweries don't let beer drop bright in the fermenter. They filter it, with either DE or sheets. You have to have a tank for the filtered beer to go into. Since the filtered beer is "bright beer", the receiving tank is a "bright beer tank". Once the beer is in the bright tank, it's carbonated then packaged.

Some breweries do achieve a certain amount of carbonation in the conical through the use of spunding valves.

In brewpubs the bright beer tanks do double-duty as serving vessels.

You can do the same process at home. Northern Brewer (and other outlets) sell rough-polish filtration systems where CO2 pressure is used to push finished beer from one keg through a filter to another. Many amateur brewers scoff at filtration. I don't. I think the visual presentation is important, and I don't have the patience to let all my beers drop bright through patience; I don't get to brew as much as I'd like. My Classic American Pilsner, for example, needs to be absolutely star-bright for me to be satisfied with it. I don't want to lager it for months and months, so I filter it through 5-micron sheets.

I'm lucky enough to have a winemaking store near me that will rent me a small, pump-drive plate-and-frame filter for an afteroon. I assemble and sanitize the machine, connect the filter's input line to the output of my fermenter, the filter's output to the input of a keg, then turn the filter on. In only slightly more time than it takes me to merely transfer, I've got star-bright beer. Then it's connect the gas and carbonate. I can be drinking that beer the same day I filter it.

Yum.

Anyhow, that's what a bright tank does in a commercial brewery.

Bob

Well if no other reason motivated them I should think the enormous stored energies from any pressurization would be a serious limiting factor.

The load that One PSI would produce on a vessel surface of a paltry 1000 Sq inches is a thousand pounds. The fermenters are huge, so they have a hell of a lot of square inches. Trying to build a vessel as large as a commercial fermenter that can be rated for even a lousy few PSI would be a crippling cost undertaking.

It'd have to be like three inches thick. More probably, and reinforced with external buttressing.

Don't overthink this, Cliff.

Many BBTs are single-wall stainless. They're not three inches thick. They're sheet-metal welded together. Some of them hold 300bbl.

They usually have 30psi pressure-relief valves, though, so they don't exceed a safe load.

Bob

THat and the fermentation chambers are 'premium' space so they want those constantly in production, not sitting and clearing or being carb'd. The brite tanks are very basic holding vessels.

Bob said:

Don't overthink this, Cliff.

Many BBTs are single-wall stainless. They're not three inches thick. They're sheet-metal welded together. Some of them hold 300bbl.

They usually have 30psi pressure-relief valves, though, so they don't exceed a safe load.

Bob

Click to expand...

They are not the size of the fermenters.
Read with comprehension

Cliff897 said:

They are not the size of the fermenters.
Read with comprehension

Click to expand...

I don't understand your point. Most BBTs are bigger than the fermenters that feed them. So breweries are force carbonating beer in tanks of similar construction and larger than their fermenters.

Cliff897 said:

They are not the size of the fermenters.
Read with comprehension

Click to expand...

If I don't understand what you've written, write with clarity.

BBTs can be any size. They can be exactly the same size as fermenters. They can be smaller. They can be immensely larger. In one brewpub for which I brewed, the brewhouse was 3.5bbl. There were two 4bbl conicals and four 8bbl. There were four 7bbl serving tanks and four 3.5bbl serving tanks. If BBTs are not the size of fermenters, they're only slightly smaller. A conical labeled "3.5bbl" is going to hold more than 4bbl in total volume, because you need headroom for krauesen. A BBT labeled "3.5bbl" is probably actually 3.5bbl, because it's holding liquid that isn't going to produce several dozen cubic meters of brown, scummy foam; you don't need the headroom.

Think about it for a second. Ever seen a Corny keg? Ever seen a beer bottle? They don't undergo any different pressures than a BBT. Again, you're trying to logic your way around something about which you have no practical experience.

Unlike you, I know all this from experience, having spent the past decade in the brewing business. Rather than get snippy, just listen and learn. Then when you have something to teach me, I'll return the favor.

Oh snap, no he didn't

I also wonder if BBT (being that they are usually cylinders) are cheaper than the cylindro-conical fermenters? Perhaps another reason why you would prefer to have the BBT vs pushing the filtered beer into another fermenter.

We have 300 bbl. cylindro-conical fermenters that we use as bright tanks for the beer we don't filter. We brew the beer then bottle right from the fermenter. The fermenter costs more but it saves time.

Sorry- I know this is a pretty old thread but I had a related question.

so you could use the conical fermenters though like this for carbonating safely as long as you say add a pressure relief valve of some sort in case it goes above 30 psi or so?..

Bob said:

I'm lucky enough to have a winemaking store near me that will rent me a small, pump-drive plate-and-frame filter for an afteroon. I assemble and sanitize the machine, connect the filter's input line to the output of my fermenter, the filter's output to the input of a keg, then turn the filter on. In only slightly more time than it takes me to merely transfer, I've got star-bright beer. Then it's connect the gas and carbonate. I can be drinking that beer the same day I filter it.Bob

Click to expand...

Like a Buon Vino Mini-Jet filter?

You can carbonate in a conical, you can carbonate anywhere. It's just that in commercial breweries, fermenters are for fermenting beer, they don't have the time/tank space to keep beer in a fermenter unless it's fermenting (at Troegs we don't, anyway). And they also need a tank to filter beer to. Bottling/kegging off of a fermenter gets messy, too, because there's a whole ton of yeast at the bottom, so package off the racking arm? Then you'd have to spin it around once the level of beer drops below it's inlet, and then you'd have to purge yeast out of it again...see the problem? It's complicated. It's just plain easier to use a flat-bottom tank to package out of.

I was told by my local brewery that their brite tank serves double duty as their post-filtration vessel and their tax vessel. It's been verified at a certain volume and so they use it for tax purposes. Plus as has been stated upthread the quicker beer is transferred out of the fermenter the faster they can brew more. In a small brewery constantly butting up against max capacity that's a critical reason to use a brite tank all on it's own.

Bob said:

You can do the same process at home. Northern Brewer (and other outlets) sell rough-polish filtration systems where CO2 pressure is used to push finished beer from one keg through a filter to another. Many amateur brewers scoff at filtration. I don't. I think the visual presentation is important, and I don't have the patience to let all my beers drop bright through patience; I don't get to brew as much as I'd like.

Bob

Click to expand...

I tied filtering, IIRC I was running it through 60um and then a .22um I grabbed from work. Worked great but did nothing for the common problem most home brewers run into: chill haze.

The only thing that cures chill haze is patience and by then everything settles out anyway while cold crashing...So I stopped wasting time and money on filtering.

And yes I could taste a difference, the filtered beer had less aroma. My CCed beers look crystal clear.

BriceBrewer said:

I was told by my local brewery that their brite tank serves double duty as their post-filtration vessel and their tax vessel. It's been verified at a certain volume and so they use it for tax purposes. .

Click to expand...

Would you mind explaining the tax benefits in detail? I don't really understand this part of it...seems to be worth exploring.

meatwad said:

Would you mind explaining the tax benefits in detail? I don't really understand this part of it...seems to be worth exploring.

Click to expand...

I don't think "benefit" is the right term. They're likely using it as a tax determination vessel. Legally, since you are taxed by the volume of beer you produce, you must transfer the beer to a specifically measured vessel to record the total taxable volume prior to selling the beer. A lot of this is up to local/state laws/regulations.

Paulgs3 said:

The only thing that cures chill haze is patience and by then everything settles out anyway while cold crashing...So I stopped wasting time and money on filtering.

Click to expand...

Well...true, but only partly.

Patience is not the only thing that cures chill haze. Technique in the brewhouse to prevent haze-precursor formation in the first place is the method I recommend. Patience is what you practice when you screw up in the brewhouse, take your beer through the ferment, pour a serving, look at it and say, "Damn. Chill haze."

If you practice brewing techniques designed to reduce chill-haze precursors, you don't need patience.

Note to the wise: Avoid using absolute terms like "always" "only" and "never". Lord knows I've been guilty of that myself.

Bob

slightly OT, but does anyone know at what temp they would generally force carb, and how long it takes in the brite tanks?

Cliff897 said:

Well if no other reason motivated them I should think the enormous stored energies from any pressurization would be a serious limiting factor.

The load that One PSI would produce on a vessel surface of a paltry 1000 Sq inches is a thousand pounds. The fermenters are huge, so they have a hell of a lot of square inches. Trying to build a vessel as large as a commercial fermenter that can be rated for even a lousy few PSI would be a crippling cost undertaking.

It'd have to be like three inches thick. More probably, and reinforced with external buttressing.

Click to expand...

Have you ever been on a brewery tour?