Commercial Brewing heat regulation

Hey guys

I have been doing some research on different brewing systems and there is one thing that i cant figure out.

What is the main system that big breweries or microbreweries use. I know most fly sparge but i cant find out if they just use infusions, herms, rims, steam injections, i dont know??

any ideas??

 

pressurized steam.

 

Well, I can speak from brewery tours here in colorado at least... And I can tell you right off the bat why you have trouble answering the question.... they all seem to be different.

New Belgian IIRC used a giant heat exchanger that they pumped the wort through and then some other liquid through to heat it (new belgian has stated that they also do decoction mash, but I havent seen that setup).

Avery brewery used hot water infusions.

Twisted pine had a heat exchanger with a grant setup to step mash.

The setups I saw at coors were all direct fire mash, but I dont know what they actually use today.

 

Similar to homebrewing there are a multitude of different commercial systems out there.

 

The two brewpubs I toured just used a giant insulated mash tun. Like our Igloo coolers but shinier The one was a 5bbl system, I don't remember the other.

-Joe

 

That's pretty common for the smaller scale brew systems. With the thermal mass of even just 3 bbl's, temp loss is pretty easy to overcome. I've also seen a couple of ~3bbl direct fired RIMS systems.

 

That makes sense actualy, if you have a larger boil volume it will loose its heat at a much slower pace, never thought of that.

THanks guys