Help me choose a fermenter.

[Symons3rd]

I own a small apple orchard. I have been making hard cider for just over a year. I currently use Speidel’s Plastic 30L fermenters. I own 6. I want to increase my capacity. I am think I want the durability of stainless steel, but could be talked out of it. I currently keg in the cider in Petairner disposable kegs, so I do not need to worry about carbonating the cider.
My question is should I go for a variable volume flat bottom tank, variable volume conical, or a just a conical.
Here are links to the three I am look at.

https://www.morebeer.com/products/brewmaster-series-chronical-1-barrel.html

https://morewinepro.com/products/220l-58g-speidel-variable-volume-tank.html

https://morewinepro.com/products/300l-79g-variable-volumeconical-bottom.html


The Petainer keg can be found here.
http://www.g3order.com/petainer-keg-20l-npr-usd/


If you want to check out my orchard you can check here.
https://www.facebook.com/mitchellgrove/

 

[beernutz]

None of your first 4 links worked for me. It looks like parts of those URLs were truncated and replaced with ellipses.

 

[MarkKF]

I know of several commercial cideries that use plastic only. None of them conical.

 

[Symons3rd]

None of your first 4 links worked for me. It looks like parts of those URLs were truncated and replaced with ellipses.

I fixed the links. In general if expense was not your first consideration, what would you buy?

 

[beernutz]

I fixed the links. In general if expense was not your first consideration, what would you buy?

The 3 options were
$1395 for 31 gallons - $45 / gallon capacity
$545 for 58 gallons - $9.40 / gallon capacity
$1120 for 79 gallons - $14.18 / gallon capacity

Even if cost wasn't my first consideration it is a consideration so unless that first morebeer conical was dramatically better than the other two I'd likely exclude it. Disclaimer: I've never owned a conical and really have no desire to own one as I'm happy with the fermentation container I use.

Between the second two, which are both built by Speidel--a brand we apparently both admire, it is a toss up. It looks like you could buy two of the second one to get 116 gallons capacity for less than the cost of the third one. Not knowing anything about your batch sizes I'd just be guessing how important extra capacity is to you. The difference between two and three looks mainly to be the conical aspect. If conical is important to you then three, if not two. This looks like a fun decision to have to make as you probably can't go wrong with any of the 3 options.