Beer Forum

At Lagunitas, they had a hot liquor tank that kept a large supply of water at mashing temp. It was running 24/7/365. I must have cost a fortune to keep all that water hot. I am often wrong about numbers, but I remember that it was thousands of dollars every month.

I have seen instant hot water heaters for hotels and apartment buildings. Would one of them work for a professional brewery? What reasons could there be that a brewery wouldn't want to use one.

I would think that it would pay for its self in no time.

Actually it would not pay for itself. These "instant" water heaters are designed for residential type use. Stop and think about the total amount of hot water you use at home in a day along with the actual amount of time you have the hot water running. The total volume is fairly small and for a vast majority of the day, you are using none at all. It doesn't make much sense for most of us to use a conventional water heater, keeping it hot for the 22-23 hours a day we are not using it.

A brewery, on the other hand, is using hot water all day long in large quantities. The on-demand heater runs full blast as long as you are running water. A conventional heater only runs long enough to heat the water in storage up to a set temperature. The insulation in the tank holds the water at temperature for quite a while until normal heat losses or water usage (being replenished with cold water) drops the temperature to another set point.

The on-demand heater would be running full blast most of the day in a brewery setting. The energy useage would most likely be a great deal higher than a conventional heater/boiler system especially when sized to be able to handle the flow rate needed.

The question then, should not be "why aren't the breweries using on-demand heaters" but rather, "why aren't most of us?"

Wayne
Bugeater Brewing Company

Funny you mention that! I ws actually thinking the same thing today! I figue that with a carbon filter attatched, it would save me a hell of a lot of trips in and out of the house during my brewday. Also, it would be much faster to bring water up to a boil if it was already say 155-170. Using cleaners like PBW that require hot water would be a breeze.

Big Chooch wrote:Funny you mention that! I ws actually thinking the same thing today! I figue that with a carbon filter attatched, it would save me a hell of a lot of trips in and out of the house during my brewday. Also, it would be much faster to bring water up to a boil if it was already say 155-170. Using cleaners like PBW that require hot water would be a breeze.

You would not want to use a carbon filter with hot water. It just doesnt work at hight temps.

HH

Couldn't the filter be placed inline before the tankless water heater?

Thats how I was thinking about doing it. Good to mention HH.

I'll disagree with you a bit Wayne and say that I think on-demand systems would be more efficient no matter what. No matter how much insulation, it's hard to beat heating water as it's used so it never has a chance to lose energy to the surroundings. Certainly, the savings wouldn't be as dramatic as in a home, because most of those savings are realized by not needing hot water 20 hours a day, as you said.

However, I think the real reason they're less common in big installations are that they're really freaking expensive compared to a big kettle and a fire. They also need to be electric and getting enough power to heat that fast would require gi-normous currents. Resevoir systems can use smaller elements and take more time to heat them to the desired temp.

I have seen electric, LP, and Natural Gas instant heaters.