What the capacity number means

2500 L, 3500 L and 5000 L refer to hot wort per brew, not annual output. A 2500 L brewhouse running six turns a day is a different machine from the same vessel running two, and that difference decides vessel count, heat exchanger size and how much cellar you need behind it. Most of our commercial craft beer production lines are built as two-, three- or four-vessel configurations: mash tun, lauter tun, brew kettle, whirlpool, with the kettle and whirlpool combined on smaller footprints.

Fabrication details that show up later

Brewhouse shells are SUS304, 3 mm on the body and 4 mm on heads, with dimple jackets on the kettle and lauter tun. Wort contact surfaces on the cold side are built in SUS316L where the water chemistry or cleaning chemicals make chloride stress corrosion a realistic risk. Interior welds are ground and pickled, wort contact surfaces held at Ra ≤ 0.6 µm; exterior cladding is a working finish, not a show finish. Each jacket is hydro-tested and the relief valve we ship matches the pressure stamped on the vessel plate. Mismatched valves and plates are common on imported skids, and inspectors do check.

Automation, and where it usually breaks down

A PLC with recipe storage covers mash step ramping, sparge flow, boil timing and whirlpool rest. The parts worth arguing about at the design stage are line sizing and valve schedules. Undersized wort lines with a long run to the cellar cost you transfer time and pick up oxygen on the way. Two-stage plate heat exchangers, glycol at 2 °C, wort out at 10–12 °C for ale, colder for lager.

Technical specifications

Questions we get before a PO

Can we expand from 2500 L to 5000 L later? Sometimes. Leave ceiling height, glycol header capacity and spare PLC I/O in the first build; replacing a brewhouse is cheaper than rebuilding a cellar twice.

Do we need four vessels? Only if you brew and lauter simultaneously. Continuous turnover justifies it. Two brews a day usually does not.

What utilities do you need from us? Steam capacity, chilled water, compressed air and floor loading. Send the room dimensions and we will return a layout with clearances for tank pulls and CIP access.

Tell us your batch size, beer type, number of fermentation tanks and available space. We can recommend the tank volume, cooling area and configuration for your brewery.