So I am planning my new garage brewery. I am building a dedicated brewing space and trying to think everything through as much as possible. I will certainly overlook some stuff, but that’s life.
my question is ventilation. I am having the builder put in a large exhaust fan. But no hood vent. Is there a need to truly install a hood vent? Or would garage door open and exhaust fan on be enough? Everything is electric.
I brew in the garage, upper mid-west, so I get the advantage of real hot or real cold weather.
I keep the double door open about 18". That creates a gap at the top of ~12" and the bottom is 18".
I have a service door at the back corner that I open to have cross ventilation.
That usually results in a decent breeze through the garage (3-car) so much that I have to close the service door sometimes to reduce turbulence and the risk of dust landing in the kettle.
Even with that much airflow I still get condensation all over my tools and since they are expensive tools I don't like that.
Open doors will not necessarily cure that problem.
Now if you add a hood at the proper height & CFM to capture the steam, you still need to have some inlet for fresh air to replace the volume that the hood exhausts. Ideally you have a furnace filter on the inlet to minimize dust. Could be as simple as a window with something to hold the filter.
Also consider that if you have a hood it will produce a negative pressure that can result in exhaust (CO) from furnaces or water heaters being sucked into the structure rather than going up the intended flue. That is often a problem with "whole house" fans.
Even if the appliances are in the basement, if you open a door to the house from the evacuated garage you can create that reverse flow in the flues.
So Dust & CO are two things to consider in addition to the excess moisture.
