When I was planning and designing my brewery, I found it immensely useful that a handful of brewers (The Bruery, Hess Brewing, Monkish, to name a few) out there had chronicled their construction and design process with such great detail. I feel like I owe the community my thoughts and experiences. This post only covers some of the construction - it's impossible to share all of the little details. If you're not at all interested in how a brewery is built (read: how our brewery is built), I suggest to stop here, because this blog post contains a stupid-amount of words and contains very little discussion on craft beer. If one brewer-of-the-future benefits from this discussion, it'll make it all worth it. And, I'll cover equipment in a separate post.
Phase 1: Concrete
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| The first block removed |
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| Removing concrete blocks |
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| View from the front door, before we installed the rebar |
Our sloped concrete slab was designed to be 3,000 psi and four inches thick with a 1:50 slope towards trench drains (hereafter referred to as the sloped slab or brewing area). The sloped slab was originally planned to have a 6-inch high concrete containment curb entirely encircling the brewing area. When the County Health Department told Orange County brewers that they were stepping out of the brewery plan review and inspection business, labeling us as low hazard food products, we ditched the containment curb because we knew it would significantly increase the functionality of our brewery (we don't have a fork lift). We had GF Concrete Cutting in Santa Ana come in and cut-and-remove the existing concrete slab, which in some places was up to 6-inches thick. The structural engineer (TKJ Engineering out of Coronado) specified that there shall be deepened areas where the new sloped slab meets the existing slab and where the fermentation and brewhouse vessels would sit - if I recall correctly, the deepened areas are 12-inches deep. The slab contains a matrix of steel rebar that ties into the rebar matrix in the existing slab with epoxied rebar. At the last minute, we hand-crafted a custom form for a poured-in-place concrete trench drain (I originally specified a very nice stainless steel pre-sloped manufactured trench drain). The concrete was poured on May 24.
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| Concrete! |
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| Pouring concrete |
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| Pouring concrete |
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| It's an art; pouring concrete |
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| David cleans up the edges |
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| Beginning to remove the forms for the trench drains |
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| Finished concrete trench drains (before final coating) |
Concrete takes almost a month to cure, so we took the time to work on a couple other things while we waited. We sealed the concrete with a polyurethane coating over the July 4 holiday weekend. I was contacted out of the blue by Greg Roberts from Stonhard, a manufacturer and installer of high quality commercial and industrial floor coatings. After I learned that The Bruery and Pizza Port Bressi Ranch (among others) were using this product, it was a no brainer. I even contacted Patrick Rue to see how their floors are holding up. When he replied, he said they were about to install their fourth Stonhard floor, giving me plenty of confidence that this would be a great product for us. Within a few weeks of receiving the email from Greg, we were lined up to install the floor. The coating is installed in a day and rock hard by the next day. The installer starts by grinding the surface of the concrete to open it up a little bit. They vacuum up as much dust as they can while they are grinding. The polyurethane coating is mixed up in batches and then poured on the concrete slab. Two guys mix the concrete in 5-gallon buckets while one guy spreads the coating around with a trowel. The polyurethane is self-leveling but should be evenly distributed across the floor. Finally, once the coating has been spread out evenly, sand is aggressively thrown across the surface. The sand sinks into the coating creating a texture. Our experience with the flooring has been great so far - it is durable and I compare the texture to velcro (no slipping!).
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| Grinding and vacuuming the new slab |
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| Troweling on the polyurethane |
Phase 2: Utilities
Water was easy - we have an existing 2-inch water line coming into our building. All we had to do was run copper pipe from the existing line to the brewing area and our new sinks. Electricity was not bad - we have a supply of 3 phase, 480 volt, 200 amp electricity in our building. We have an existing transformer, too. Sewer was no problem - we have an existing (4-inch?) sewer line that we tied into. We hired Crandall's Plumbing out of Huntington Beach to do our sewer, water, gas, and vent plumbing, and Skelly Electric out of Escondido to do the electrical work.
Gas was another story... My building did not have any gas service when I started planning the brewery almost three years ago. I called the gas company multiple times and set up multiple field meetings to discuss how we could convey gas to our building. Up until some time in June, we were consistently told that the new gas service would originate from a new underground meter vault installed in the sidewalk right in front of our building - approximately 20-feet from our property line. Then, in June, we were lucky enough to get upper-management on site to assess the gas situation, only to find out that gas service could not originate from in front of our building, but instead from the location of an existing gas meter, about 100-feet to the north east from our property line. The world turned upside down.
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| Planning the new gas alignment in an adjacent basement |
Within a week we had re-engineered (by CJTSS Consulting Engineers out of Walnut) drawings ready for submittal to the City. I hastily set up a meeting with our plan checker and we were done within an hour. We scheduled GF Concrete Cutting to come back and core through the two concrete walls and one brick wall that separated us from the existing gas meter. Over the course of a weekend, my plumbers installed about 75-feet of two-inch threaded black steel gas pipe. The gas line extended from the existing meter in the public right of way, through one basement, then through an existing 20-inch thick concrete wall, then through a second neighboring basement, and finally through an 18-inch thick brick wall into our building. It then had to be run through our building to the kettle and water heater. Our kettle burner is designed for 5 to 14" water column and up to 700,000 btus (it heats up about 550 gallons of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit per minute, give or take). We do not have high pressure gas although that is an option - our engineers decided it was not necessary for our application based on the currently available pressures.
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| The new meter installed! |
When the City inspected our gas line, we learned that the City of Santa Ana requires a 24-hour gas pressure test on all gas lines that are 2-inches or larger. The 24-hour gas pressure test is set up on one day, initialed by the inspector, then left alone at a specific pressure (around 15 psi) for 24-hours. The inspector returns the next day to find that there is a line drawn around the entire clock with little-to-no fluctuation in 15 psi. We passed the test, no problem. Thanks to Sam, Pablo, Rollo, and the rest of the gang at Crandalls Plumbing!
Running the vent pipe through the roof was another adventure. Our kettle has two stacks - exhaust and steam. For the exhaust stack we selected a double-walled b-vent pipe that comes in three-foot sections. The steam pipe, however, was custom made of stainless steel - in case condensation drips back down in the kettle and manages to circumvent the drip-catch. There were points where we had six guys holding the pipe at various heights to get it straight and well strapped down. We hand-built each strap out of stainless metal with EMT pipe extending out to the nearest wood. Our brewery has two additional vents - one sewer vent and one water-heater double-walled b-vent.
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| Bryce installs a metal casing for the vent |
Electrical was relatively straight forward. We had an existing switch gear, transformer, and three breaker panels (lighting, receptacles, air conditioning, etc). The engineers called for one new breaker panel to service all the new brewery equipment and one new 600-amp disconnect to be installed between the transformer and breaker panels. The breaker panel runs wire from each breaker out to a disconnect (or switch) located at each piece of equipment. I learned the hard way about "normally open" and "normally closed" switches. Each of our fermentation tanks is controlled by a Ranco temperature controller - the same thing I've been using at home for years to control fermentation temperatures. At home, a single stage temperature controller shuts off the power to my chest freezer when it reaches a desired temperature. In the brewery, I needed the Ranco to open the solenoid valve when it gets to hot, and close the solenoid when it is cold enough. Setting up the Ranco in the brewery does not require anything more than a single-stage temperature controller - but you must set it to open (NC or normally open) when you reach the top of your temperature differential, and close (NC or normally closed) when you want the solenoid to close.
Phase 3: Glycol
The glycol system could be broken into multiple sub-phases. One sub-phase included building the structural support for the G&D 7x7 Glycol Chiller on the roof, and a second sub-phase covers the installation of the GF Cool-Fit ABS glycol piping.
The chiller was paid for back in early April and I was given an 8-week lead time. We timed this so that the chiller would be delivered after the concrete was poured, but before the concrete coating was applied. We needed a custom chiller sizing due to height limitations in our zoning district. We needed at least a 12 HP Chiller so that we could keep our fermentations under control and simultaneously chill wort out of the kettle. G&D worked with me to identify what our demand would be, and we designed a 7x7 chiller system (two side-by-side 7 HP chillers, creating redundancy and enough power for wort chilling). I chose G&D because they are a reputable company that was willing to work within my height constraints.
We had to structurally reinforce the roof trusses to support the chiller. My structural engineer located the chiller above the peak of our roof, where seismic reinforcements were installed about 10-years ago. We basically installed v-shaped wood supports that were strapped to the ceiling directly below the glycol chiller on the roof, distributing the weight to a 12x12 beam that runs north-south through out building. On the roof, the chiller sits on two pressure treated 4x8's, which are lag-screwed through the roof and into the v-shaped support within the building below. All screws and roof penetrations are enclosed with roof mastic (that's nasty shit!). The chiller was lifted to the roof by crane (Benson Crane Services in Santa Ana) and placed on top of some very nice vibration-absorbing pads, then bolted down to the 4x8's.
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| Support for the glycol chiller |
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| Crane lifts the chiller to the roof |
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| Chiller in its final resting place |
My plumbers have been busy all summer working on the new East End market. So we decided to take on the assembly and installation of the GF Cool-Fit piping system. Sean Roth from Ryan Herco Flow Solutions reached out to me near the beginning of construction - they're a local distributor of GF Cool-Fit as well as many other piping systems. Sean brought in Scott Stringfellow from GF to discuss our system. I designed and estimated quantities for the piping system along with my contractor. With the chiller in place, we installed the glycol system, over 200-feet of Cool-Fit, over a weekend with the help of my brother and dad. We learned everything we know from this online
video and the product manual.
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| Bryce starts the Cool-Fit installation |
I designed the glycol piping system for future tanks and there are several different ways it could be reconfigured to accommodate future growth. On a very high level, assembling the Cool-Fit requires several steps: (1) work a well ventilated and dust-free area; (2) apply solvent cleaner to the inside of the pipe and outside of the nipple and wipe dry with a lint-free towel; (3) apply the cement in an axial direction to the inside of the pipe and outside of the nipple; and (4) connect the two. It takes 10-minutes for the cement to chemically cure, after which you may add mechanical pressure. You really get into a motion putting this stuff together. Once you get a hang of it, installation goes quickly and efficiently. We had one "ground support" member cutting and applying solvent cleaner to the pipe and two team members dry-fitting, measuring, and applying cement to the fittings/nipples/pipe from atop the scaffolding.
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| Finished Cool-Fit system |
The Cool-Fit is suspended on "trapeze" that we custom-built out of uni-strut and all-thread. We had to special order the strut pipe clamps because the Cool-Fit is a metric pipe and most of the strut pipe clamps available in the USA are in Imperial units of measurement. I wanted the strut pipe clamps because I didn't like the idea of strapping all that Cool-Fit down with the plastic clamps in the GF catalog.
Miscellaneous Construction
Our tasting room tables were custom built by my contractor and his metal guy, Charlie. Jon is an expert at building tables (he also made my kitchen table years ago). Jon assembled the table tops from planks of Maple, sanded them down, and screwed them to a metal support made out of square tubing and angle-iron.
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| Sanding the table tops |
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| Legs and support for new tables |
I wanted our brewery to be very open so that we could move about, communicate from across the brewery, and be aware of where everyone is. It also makes for a pretty cool spectacle from the tasting room. In order to run the electrical and water/gas/vent piping, we had to build some custom uni-strut walls. We had existing pipe-columns that were installed about ten years ago as seismic improvements. We put pipe clamps on the columns to attach the uni-strut. Our control panel for the brewhouse also hangs from the strut between the pipe-columns. In the future we'll weld or attach different fittings to hang hose or other brewery tools from the strut.
Our brewing area is separated from our tasting room by a kee-klamp railing. This is a really cool product. It is relatively easy to build a solid railing that can be disassembled (like having wheels on everything, removing the railing in the future is really important) and it looks great too.
You'll notice that we have a lot of things on wheels - our bar, tables, keg washer, etc. It's important for a brewery like ours to be very mobile. We don't have a forklift, nor are we likely to ever have one. We have furniture dollies, regular dollies, tank turtles, flat bed carts, shelf push carts, pallet jacks and a straddle stacker to help us move the heavy stuff. But other than that, this place is all about man power. If we can't move it, we don't want it!
Construction will probably never be complete... but we're in a position to brew, now.
