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How full does a fermenter or unitank need to be, minimum?

Surf Monkey Beer

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Hey guys,

So, on the brink of opening a very small craft brewery here on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia. I am looking at buying some 300 litre fermenter and conditioning tanks to get me started.

I don't think initially I will be filling the 300 litre fermenters due to running test recipies. Can I ferment 100 litres of beer in a 300 litre fermenter or is there a minimum fill level the fermenters should have?

And i will be Tank conditioning in the conditioning tanks (no force carbonating) so do the conditioning tanks need to be full or could they work with a less than half fill level?

Anyone have this knowledge the could throw my way?

Cheers
 
I personally would say the less room for air the better.  So if you purge CO2 in the tanks I believe that would work because you remove the oxygen from the tanks.  Think of it on a home brew scale.  If you have one gallon of beer in a 5 gallon glass carboy, how much CO2 will be produced to get the other 4 gallons of oxygen out of the carboy.
 
Surf Monkey Beer said:
Hey guys,

So, on the brink of opening a very small craft brewery here on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia. I am looking at buying some 300 litre fermenter and conditioning tanks to get me started.

I don't think initially I will be filling the 300 litre fermenters due to running test recipies. Can I ferment 100 litres of beer in a 300 litre fermenter or is there a minimum fill level the fermenters should have?

And i will be Tank conditioning in the conditioning tanks (no force carbonating) so do the conditioning tanks need to be full or could they work with a less than half fill level?

Anyone have this knowledge the could throw my way?

Cheers

This will depend partially on the Jacketing on the fermenters. If you have multiple zones in your jacket, you should be able to control each one individually and therefore ferment a smaller volume (you may even only be using the cone at that point. If you only have one zone, you are much more likely to freeze the beer during fermentation causing obvious issues. Check with your equipment manufacturer on options here and to be absolutely sure.  Also, you may also want to check ProBrewer.com a Pro-Brewer-centric information source. More than one source of information is always helpful!
 
Thanks guys very helpful.

I think I'm just going to keep my jacketed fermenters for set recipies and fill them. Then my test batches i will just do on a homebrew scale and ferment them in carbouys to be on the safe side.

Thanks again
 
I'm working at a commercial craft brewery. The bulk of our fermenters are 25hl and I usually go in with 23hl. I have done "half" batches with about 13hl with no problem. Actually not sure if that even covers the upper glycol jacket but we had no problems with fermentation and cooling.
 
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