Beer Brewery Equipment Cost Saving Tips

When the budget it’s lean, it’s about pairing back the equipment list. The equipment needs to be:

• Able to brew good quality beer, with consistency being key.

• The equipment should be built to last, go too cheap and you’ll have issues sooner rather than later.

• The brewery needs to be adequately sized so, it can do greater volumes in the future.

• Oversizing certain parts of the brewery, to grow into plus, some modular elements.

• Need to play around with equipment list, to make best use of the space in the shipping containers.

• One critical part is the glycol system.

Brewery Equipment Cost Saving Tips – Go with a Two-Vessel System

A two-vessel brewhouse means you have a combined mash/lauter tun, as well as a combined kettle/whirlpool.

However, with good brewing processes, you can still have an efficient brewhouse. 

DEGONG 500L Two-Vessel Brewhouse System

CIP Cart/System – Brewery Equipment Cost Saving Tips

Below 500-liters, if money for the project is tight, I’d forgo having a CIP Cart. Above, a 1,000-liter brewing system having a CIP cart becomes more viable with, the extra expense more justifiable.

My opinion on this matter may differ from other brewers. For me, being able to re-use caustic on smaller system is less important. You’ll have a fair percentage of loss during a CIP, compared to total volumes, when using a larger system. Furthermore, on smaller system the number of times you can re-use caustic is reduced.

In my real-world experience, the caustic gets dirtier quicker, with less reuses possible, compared to cleaning on a larger system. Re-using caustic is more of a wasted effort on smaller systems as result.

Optimizing Shipping Container Space – Brewery Equipment Cost Saving Tips

One unfortunate side-effect of Covid was, shipping went up in price drastically. Fortunately, prices are coming down now. Still, they are significant.

When it comes to planning equipment for your brewery, it’s worth considering how much space each vessel takes up. It might mean playing around with the configuration of the size of the fermentation tanks, to squeeze as much equipment into a container as possible. Shipping containers are 20 and 40ft. If you’re planning a 500-liter brewery, it’s possible to fit all the equipment into one 40ft container. If it means, losing one 500-liter tank, or replacing two 500-liter tanks for one 1,000-liter tank then do it.

There are other ways to squeeze in as much in as possible. If there’s some extra space in a container, fill up with some other stuff like kegs. Make the most use of all available space in a container.