Affordably Build a Glycol Chiller for Your Brewery

Many Craft Breweries have to get started on a tight budget. They are building their own brewery equipment from old stainless dairy tanks, or any tank they can find. If you are building a commercial scale brewery, expanding your brewery, or even a large home brewery, you may want to build your own glycol chiller to control the temperature of your fermenting beer.

Sam Calagione, owner of the famous Dogfish Head Brewery started his company brewing beer on a homebrew system. He brewed batch after batch on a ten gallon brew sculpture, but I guess all good things must come to an end. Ten gallon batches all day long will wear a body out!

When Sam expanded he searched high and low and purchased used stainless steel tanks that he modified into his commercial scale brew system. For a brew system you need a mash tun, lauder tun, brew kettle, fermenter, grant, hot liquor tank and other pieces of equipment. The tanks are just the beginning-you will then need to modify them and add fittings, lines, false bottoms, pumps and more to make them function as a brewery.

Here I want to talk about a great idea for a glycol chiller I saw on the FrankenBrew DVD. Tom Hennessy in the video shows how to build one out of regular copper tubing. He cut lengths of copper tubing that would wrap around the outside of the fermenter, cutting them short enough to add a manifold at each end. I guess it is hard to explain, but I will get to the basic concept.

Tom spaced the copper tubing about 5 inches or so apart and once the ends were connected to a copper manifold pipe he wrapped the assembled copper chiller around the fermenter and tightened it up with clamps. You need to tap the tubing against the side of the fermenter to flatten the tubing a little against the side of the fermenter making more of the copper surface come in contact with the surface of the fermenter.

You need to have as much surface contact between the tubing and the fermenter to the transfer of heat from the fermenter to the cold glycol in the copper tubing. Once you finish tapping all the tubing you need to tighten up the chiller again. Then add a layer of insulated material on the outside to help keep the fermenting beer cold.

Glycol chillers are the norm for most large breweries, but some breweries have their fermenters in large walk-in coolers. They adjust the cooler temperature to ferment the beer at the desired temperature. Normally ales ferment in the 60's Fahrenheit and lagers ferment in the 50's. Some Belgian ales ferment in the 70's. As a home brewer I am considering using the non-poisonous red antifreeze, or even a brine solution instead of glycol. I will have a reservoir and a copper coil mounted in a deep freeze to chill the liquid down and then install a pump to pump the chilled liquid through the chiller. A temperature controller will turn the pump on when the fermenting beer warms up and the circulating antifreeze will keep it cool.

There were so many ideas I got and the chiller was just one. You will be surprised what you will glean from Tom Hennessy's FrankenBrew DVD. If you are a home brewer, commercial brewer, or wanting to learn more about commercial brew systems, then it will be worth purchasing the DVD for yourself. I tried my best to explain, but a video is worth more words than I care to type. Thanks Tom Hennessy for making this video. You will learn every step of commercial brewing see how to build your own brewing equipment. I wonder how many new micro-breweries we will get because of Frankenbrew?