electric brewery ventilation

2021/05/21

I employed a 6" in-line blower and a hood constructed out of wood and plexiglass. Well according to a recent BYO article by John Blichmann the rule of thumb is to have a minumum of 34 cubic feet/min per kilowatt (952 l/min per kw) of heater required. In most cases a sink and faucet with a good cold water source is sufficient to drive an immersion chiller or plate chiller, but there are cases where the throughput of water or water temperature may not be low enough to drive your chiller. I have a standard oven range hood thing over my boil spot. I am very confortable with what I know, but cautious when I don't.

In these systems the entire boil pot is enclosed in a seamless hood and chimney pipe, which captures 100% of the steam. airflow, Hope you get it figured out! No permanent ventilation mods for resale purpose. I had been purchasing some of the more expensive items before the pandemic hit - and the perfect opportunity was given to me to finally get this built.

Ryan had just finished a similar ventilation setup for his system and was kind enough to share his experiences and related fees in an effort to help others in the brewing community. In a closed space you will get heavy condensation on the ceiling, walls, windows, floors and even between walls. I don't have any experience with this setup but it seems cost effective and straight forward. Download the 2010 Presentation from John Blichmann on Setting up Your Home Brewery: This is what I created. Assuming I am not concerned about the heat, could I manage the humidity with a dehumidifier in the brew area? Having toured Martin's brewery in person, I can tell you I approve of his hood design and implementation. This is known as cavitational collapse. Specialty, Fruit, Historical, Other Recipes, https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f256/easy-cheap-stainless-vent-hood-418665/, http://www.structuretech1.com/2013/10/how-to-determine-if-makeup-air-is-required/, http://www.westsidewholesale.com/la955165&pdv=c&gclid=CImdg9aegMMCFSho7AodZxgAZg, http://www.walmart.com/ip/QV-Tools-Table-Fan/39889207, View attachment ImageUploadedByHome Brew1420723463.716730.jpg, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KYR0ZF4/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004YXDQZU/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EVYGPJQ/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20, Brewery Design / Ventilation Advice Needed, 20 Gal SS Brewtech / Blichmann hybrid electric brew system, Homebrewing Classifieds - For Sale & Wanted. So, lets just focus on electric setups. In this case you only need to enough ventilation for the steam expansion factor which is about 1600 times the volume of water. In theory, it should be possible to optimize the boil, and hence obtain a high percentage of hop utilization, through the application of reduced-pressure boiling from a booster fan. I brew once every week or two, I got my moneys worth so far. Boilovers had become a problem, so I installed a booster fan in the kettles vent pipe. The factors that cause this energy transfer are temperature and pressure. Advertising Law Crash Course for Craft Breweries, Improved batch sparge and parti gyle calculator, http://www.ahaconference.org/wp-content/uploads/presentations/2010/Tips___Tricks_to_Setting_Up_Your_Own_Homebrewery-Blichmann.pdf, Quote from: kramerog on January 09, 2015, 08:18:08 am, https://www.facebook.com/Brun-Water-464551136933908/?ref=bookmarks, >> Bru'n Water Spreadsheet Walkthroughs<<, >> Bru'n Water Subscriber Version 5.3 Spreadsheet Walkthrough <<, Quote from: mabrungard on January 09, 2015, 12:38:01 pm, Official Poobah of No Life. Let me just ask the questiongiven that I am doing electric and will be doing 60 min, 5 gallon boilsdo I NEED to vent? Youll likely still collect some moisture, so make sure you have a way to drain that from the system and not let it drip back into your brew kettle. Yet, because Kolbach did not experiment with lower pressures or perform actual field trials, his work can be viewed here only as a curious reference rather than as a scientific conclusion based on experimental data. Blichmann recommends you have a minimum hood area that is 6 (15.25 cm) wider on each side than your kettle, but also that it have 50 cubic ft/min (1450 liters/min) per square foot of hood space. A few reasons come to mind: We use a ventilation system that is able to evacuate all unwanted moisture and heat and confines any odours to the brewery. The True Cost of Proper Indoor Brewing Ventilation. In addition, insulation on the outside of the duct will reduce temperature differences that would drive condensation. Physics of the boil: When enough energy (in the form of heat) is added to wort, the molecular structure of the liquid water breaks down and forms steam, waters gaseous state. Heres how. The only way to be sure you are safe! That covers the basics of ventilation. I purchased the voltage regulator (the red box on top of my Home Depot bucket) from Amazon. DMS: The breakdown of s-methyl methionine (SMM) to dimethyl sulfide (DMS) starts in the boil. The most plausible factor is the effect of vapor bubble dynamics on the boiling wort. I wanted to know why this was happening and began my own informal investigation. My family members can still detect a hint of wort aroma on brew day, though. Ryan Oxton is the Market Development Manager at Spike. Coagulation of unstable protein: Because the stream of bubbles that pass through the wort at boiling help proteins to coagulate, boiling should be vigorous.

The video below shows our ventilation system running at 100%while boiling 12 gallons of wort: Our custom hood evacuates steam and heat from our brewery: (c) Copyright TheElectricBrewery.com. All contents copyright 2022 by MoreFlavor Inc. All rights reserved. In addition you need to consider venting some of the heat coming from the pot to avoid raising the temperature excessively in the room, again creating a condensation risk. Is expansion rate 1600 or 1700? These work perfectly well, but theres nothing stopping you from making your own. It is my hope that the ideas presented in this article will encourage enterprising brewery researchers with the resources and skills to either prove or disprove these theories. Martin, you are such an underachiever not! I will note that some commercial systems lack the blower, which can create condensation in the vent pipe that can drop back into the boil creating DMS. Show us the rest of what you got going on down there! JavaScript is disabled. As a person that nearly died in a lower level office that had a water heater draft fan fail. Tjernlund states it's not for high moisture situations like this - and so I've done what I always do - voided the warranty. I used a flat, aluminum pizza pan to cover the kettle opening, cored a 4-in. More heat must therefore be produced. A rapid simmer will not do, we need a vigorous hard (rolling)boil. Im going to follow this simple design when I order the parts in a few days. Another inexpensive option is to employ a rectangle Rubbermaid tote as your hood (Google: Rubbermaid exhaust hood brew). Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. So what does that mean? Date: June 19, 2020 Posted by Ryan Oxton In a recent conversation I had with Laurence Livingston, a professional brewing consultant and experienced brewer, we Sign up for product launches, recipes, updates and more! Or at least be easily expanded/upgraded. I am going electricusing Blichmann with boil coil and will be brewing 5g batches in a 10g pot. Welcome brewers, mazers, vintners, and cider makers!

Airflow is dependent on the fan driving the system, the geometry of the ducting, and the free flow of makeup air into the system. Maybe find one at a scratch-and-dent sale? Ideally, the hood will extend a bit outside the bounds of the top of your kettle. All electric brewing system. I put a simple fan like this in the basement window. Anyone else have experience with this? Something not working right? This would be to satisfy the "brew itch" when I can't be outside. (I Got Ban Hammered by Drew), I spend way too much time on the AHA forum, Bloatarian Brewing League - Cincinnati, OH. I'm kind of thinking of just caulking around the seam and leaving it alone after that. Since that water is boiled off over an hour it works out to a very modest 7.57 cubic feet/minute (206 l/min) flow rate which can be handled easily by even a small blower or fan in the vent. Electric brewing systems look really attractive, especially when winter blows in, but its not just a matter of figuring out how to heat water and boil the wort; ventilation is every bit as important, and it can be a pricey problem to solve.

Hop utilization appeared to increase, and wort volume reduction became very consistent. Obviously the effect is highly dependent on the size of the system, size of the room, availability of outside airflow, and boil off rate. At the low end is a completely enclosed boiler of the type you would see in a craft brewery. Large fans with ducting larger than 16" in diameter may be required, making safe indoor gas brewing very expensive. Despite this, dont try to cut corners on ventilation. His results indicate that, up to a point, utilization increases as pressure and temperature increase. I used it with propane also but never noticed the condensation, probably the heat coming around the kettle took care of that.

Thanks for joining me on the BeerSmith Home Brewing Blog. Same goes for the vent going through the brewery out back. The higher temperature boils were achieved by increasing pressure in the boiling vessel. Here are some things you should consider as you design your dream system.

I should probably buy a hose to connect my immersion cooler to a drain. But even if it's galvanized it ought to last a good long while. Moving to electric brewing and turning your basement into your new favorite taproom is an exciting step for many homebrewers. Would be interested in the parts you used to get this to work? It may not display this or other websites correctly. So, if youre using a single 5,500-watt heating element, then your airflow requirement is 5,500/17.6, or 312.50 CFM. The variation of boil time within normally encountered limits was found to exert little influence on the utilization of hops. You have to either create a contained combustion/exhaust system or handle some extreme ventilation requirements. Kolbachs research, however, dealt only with increases in pressure/temperature during the boil. Works well. 1x7 strand stainless Color: Boiling wort under pressure invariably deepens a worts color the result of the caramelization of sugars and the formation of melanoidins. This has a certain logical appeal to it because generally in the brewhouse higher temperatures tend to imply a greater number of stable reactions. The Hot Liquor Tank and Mash/Lauter Tun create heat while heating strike/sparge water and mashing, however, the lids stay on most of the time, so very little moisture is created by these two kettles. Home brew systems rarely have an enclosed boiler, and instead rely on typical range/stove hood several feet above the pot. Air will take the path of least resistance, and some of it may be coming back in the window, even though it doesn't look like it. So a small size 2 ft x 2 ft hood would need at least 200 cubic ft/min throughput, and a larger 4 ft x 2 ft hood would need double that or 400 cubic ft/min. Our setup boils off almost 2 gallons of water for each hour of boil. Because efficiency is a function of relative temperature differences, and because the effects of temperature are directly related to pressure, you can improve efficiency during any season by controlling the atmospheric pressure in the kettle. Blichmanns rule of thumb is based on running a maximum length of 100 feet (30 meters) of smooth duct. Implications for brewers: Because we want to control or at least add some degree of consistency to the evaporation that takes place in our brew kettles, lets look at the variables that we can manipulate: the heat applied to the kettle and the means used to apply it (including both the amount of heat and the duration of heat application); and the air pressure in the immediate area of the boil, which is directly related to the temperature of the boil. The cheap one. Be sure to install carbon monoxide detector. Don't let the propane stand throw you off, won't be heating with that, it's just the right height to drain into my mash tun. Put the fan on a wye with a venture out of line of the moisture or insulate the exhaust system to reduce condensation. Congratulations, you've got free shipping! Heres a quick look at Ryans vent hood installation costs (Note: some costs may vary, depending on the location of your brew space and the price of materials and labor in your area): Long story short, think ahead and plan accordingly. The requirements for venting steam from your boil pot vary widely depending on the size and efficiency of your hood and size of your system. However, because forced ventilation causes the wort near the surface to be cooler, the bubbles rising into this cooler region collapse before venting as a result of the lower saturation vapor pressure in the cooler region.

I appreciate all of the feedbackI tend to over analyze things to the point of paralysis sometimes! The plexiglass lets in light from the overhead light so I can see in the kettle better. In part 1 of this series I covered some of the general considerations in planning an electric brewery including size of the system, availability of water and in particular the electrical needs of the system and electrical safety considerations. The added vigor also has many invisible potential benefits that merit exploration. So the requirement for proper airflow through the hood is actually larger than the airflow dictated by the heating coil alone. These methods are equally applicable to both home brewers and small-scale pub and microbrewers. A great location for brewing beer isnt great without proper ventilation. It was really cheap (like $50), motor, light and designed to be used above a stove. A few commercial hopbacks are available for homebrewers, (e.g., the Blichmann HopRocket). Albumin particles accumulate on the surface of the wort around the bubbles of steam and air, and because of these high local concentrations they aggregate more readily into larger masses. 2 gal times 1600 is 3200 and not 3400gal/h In actual boils, only about 7080% of the SMM is transformed in this manner.

To get the humidity out requires more serious air movement, and it helps if you can draw directly from the source. In particular, you should use smooth ducting rather than ribbed flexible ductwork. Due to the extra heat and poisonous gases that must be removed, the ventilation requirements are considerably higher with a gas brewery as compared to electric. The power of the fan (as expressed in cubic feet per meter) and the length and diameter of the pipe, which control the volume of air that can pass through it, will all have an effect on your end results. Reduced-pressure boiling can produce the same goal without radical changes to your existing brew kettles. But how much air do you need to move? It will certainly provide more air than any 4in vent would. While the ventilation requirements for an electric brewing system are far below what is needed for a gas/propane heated system, proper venting is still important. However the venting of the heat and steam is not the whole story, as you also need to consider the size and efficiency of your hood. I may have missed it but No basement windows? Around your exhaust duct, I would plug the rest of the window closed with cardboard. I hope you enjoyed this brief two part series on setting up an electric brewery. It is unlikely that lower boiling temperatures alone can increase hop utilization. The opposite can occur with lower boiling pressures and possibly shorter boil times. The unfinished area I will brew in has a door to the outside, and I feel that as long as I leave that door ajar during the boil, I should be fine. Two good ideas are to install drain holes at the low points of the duct and to make sure the hood frame has a gutter along the bottom edge for water to collect. Does a great job on the steam. This design worked even better; it stopped boilovers and led to faster wort volume reduction. As molecules gain enough energy to change state, they overcome surface tension and escape from the liquid in the process called evaporation. Range hoods also usually have variable speed fans and some sort of task lighting built in. Since this is an electric brewery, the wood and plexiglass is not an issue. I really enjoy brewing outside when the weather allows. Typically, as the wort is vaporized at the bottom of the kettle, the bubbles rise, burst at the surface, and the steam escapes into the air. Its unlikely that your setup would actually need more than 100 feet, but this is where geometry has an impact. What you propose may work. The more vigorously the wort is boiled, the more complete the coagulation. So I want to make it last as long as I can. Hi Everyone! For example a 5 gal (19 l) electric system in a well ventilated kitchen which already has a stove vent and good airflow from nearby windows may be no problem at all. When hes not guiding aspiring homebrewers with their first systems or working with breweries as they upgrade their operations, he enjoys spending time with family and losing the occasional golf ball or two. The design needs to minimize the conditions that favor condensation. The wife is already not thrilled about 1 hole (even though she did get me the electric kettle for Christmas). A Type II hood is designed to vent moisture and heat from grease-free sources, such as a dishwasher or oven. I'm looking for one in the garage to keep the steam and Odors at bay and to brew in comfort in the winter with no doors open. This can lead to mold, permanent damage to the drywall, and other nasty issues. I'm only looking to brew partial mash / extract in the basement right now. Thanks for the responses. Commercial kitchen hoods work great, but theyre usually quite expensive. Ya tease, Martin! That can turn a sealed room into a sauna, with condensation dripping from the walls, ceilings, and windows. The modification stopped the boilovers and also caused some unexpected positive side effects.

This section considers some of the desirable characteristics of the boil and how forced ventilation affects them. I'm going to be heating and boiling in the same kettle and it will be directly beneath a basement window that's 28x28 inches. According to the first law of thermodynamics, change in temperature is approximately equal to the heat added or subtracted plus pressure change; or, change in temperature is approximately equal to the change in pressure. Any gain in bitterness would be offset by the obvious economic disadvantages of protracted boiling. But if you do decide to buy a dedicated fan, I would go bigger than you really need so you take advantage of a quieter operation.

Now I have a 10-gallon (38-liter) outdoor propane setup, but I miss the convenience of brewing indoors where weather is less of a concern. Theoretically, all of the SMM in the wort can be broken down to DMS and then, with good evaporation, removed in the vapor. Press J to jump to the feed. With the only source of air now being across the basement, you can be pretty sure the air exchange you want is happening. In this article we'll describe exactly how we accomplish this using a custom hood and an industrial fan. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. All we need to do is take a look at the amount of water boiled off during an average brewing session to see that the steam needs somewhere to go. John Blichmann of Blichmann Engineering offers a good rule of thumb for electric brewing systems: take the size of your electrical elements in watts and divide this by 17.6 to get the number of cubic feet of air per minute (CFM). But I cant leave anything alone, so I decided to improve upon it. hole in it, and connected this by means of a metal flex drier duct to the hood. An indoor electric setup however requires some assistance in the form of a vent hood and a fan to evacuate the heat, moisture, and smell outdoors. So for example a 2 gal/hour (4 l/hour) boil off would produce 1600 times that volume in steam or 3,400 gallons (13,600 liters) of steam. It is important to collect vapor condensation from the boil to prevent it from running back into the kettle. When I brew it drips water out and along the bowl, and has been running this way for a year now. This description of the method which is equally applicable in home and small-scale commercial breweries includes an exploration of the physical and chemical processes at work in boiling wort. Installing a booster fan in the vent pipe of the (enclosed) brew kettle can even out some of the variables that may occur in your brewing. The plexiglass allows more light into the brewing area from the overhead light. I think insulating it might be my best option. You may need to open a window in the room to supply the system with sufficient makeup air. When designing your ventilation system, there are a few factors to consider: air intake, airflow, and condensation handling. But after talking with Ryan from Old Standby Brewing in Salem, Oregon, I quickly learned that my recommendation could be an expensive one. The phenomenon of cavitational collapse in incompressible liquids was first described by Lord Raleigh in 1895. Learn how to convert your propane system or build an electric system from the ground up with Craft Beer & Brewing Magazines How to Build Your Electric Brewery two-part online class. (Increased hop utilization will mean some adjustments to your formulation. 6" blower, plexiglass, and wood. Since the system is forcing air out of the room, there needs to be enough replacement air coming in from outside. It worked great it added more light and sucked away the steam. So why brew indoors at all? Some time ago when I built my home brewery (in a shed in the backyard), I encountered a problem with steam from the kettle condensing in the building. Although I'm in Texas and it's really hot in the summer here - the brewery is air conditioned so it'll stay relatively cool even then. The job of the system is to vent all the excess moisture out. looking for reasonably priced ventilation options / recommendations. Some solutions can be expensive, but the cost to clean up a mold problem could be even more. If I get a year or two out of it I'll be happy. Indoor brewing is convenient, but building out a good electrical brew system is not a cheap proposition. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. *Table developed from data in reference 4. This second type, also known as a condensate hood, is what you want. The possible explanations for the effects that I observed as a result of this simple modification include the physics and chemistry at work in wort boils. These hot spots have temperatures of roughly 9032 F (5000 C) and pressures of about 500 atmospheres. The concern is how to properly vent the steam/moisture. It is not uncommon for the ventilation and make-up air system of a gas based indoor brewery to cost more than the brewing setup itself. $0.00. You didn't say how big your system would be. To clarify, I am going to do the salad bowl w/ fan to vent, but just rely on the door for makeup air. The result of these brewing trials agrees with Kolbachs observation that the optimal temperature for the isomerization of alpha-acids under laboratory conditions is 223 F (106 C). While you can wipe down those surfaces, persistent humidity in the room can lead to mold problems, water damage, andworst of allinfected beer. This week I take a look at the other major physical constraint which is ventilation. A good rolling boil on 6 gallons of liquid puts off a lot of steam. 2 gal/hour is not the same as (4 l/hour) You get your system set up without a hitch, you get your electrician over to wire the proper outlet, you connect your hoses and mill your grain and get ready to brew. As I mentioned in part 1 you may also want to look at your water requirements, particularly for chilling your wort, as that can be a third driver of where and how to size your electric brewery. Since the advent of steam power in the brewing industry, a wide variety of kettle shapes have been designed, each with the purpose of achieving improved boil dynamics and improving wort consistency. In 1955 Kolbach studied the effects of high-temperature wort boils on hop utilization (see Table II). To browse some of our top-selling pieces of all-grain brewing equipment, click here! Its fan is underpowered, and some kitchen hoods cant even be ducted outside. Tagged as: These conditions could certainly increase hop utilization in the wort boil. The hood needs to be large enough to capture the steam and also you need sufficient airflow to move the steam collected out of the hood before it spills out of the hood. This whole process was a little daunting at first but after a little reading I stumbled upon this webpage that has a worksheet you fill in values to and determine if makeup air is needed. The only problem I ran into was some leaking coming from my vent fan. Love the polished stainless. One of the fundamental reasons why we chose electric over gas is that it is considerably easier to vent an indoor brewery safely when electricity is used to heat. Whichever solution you choose, just make sure you keep the moisture off your walls and in your beer. electric brewery, While we love the smell of grain being mashed (it's similar to the smell of bread baking), not everyone does. This last item is often overlooked. I figure I should buy a replacement soon and just swap it out when it eventually fails. do I NEED to vent? I would bet you're going to have a rather frustrating first brew day if you plan on just using an open door for ventilation. I have been working on building a brewery in my backyard all through this Covid nightmare. Be sure to sign up for my newsletter or my podcast (also on itunesand youtubeandstreaming radio station) for more great tips on homebrewing. In our brewery, when the boiling temperature dropped because of forced ventilation, hop utilization increased (with no other factors being changed). Cavitational collapse can produce intense local heating and high pressures for very short lifetimes.