The Most Essential Commercial Brewery Equipment

Starting up your own brewery is by no means a small endeavor. Even if you have a lot of experience brewing in your own home, you’ll find out pretty quickly just how much time and effort it takes to turn that into a larger business and a full brewery. Being a commercial brewery means pumping out a steady supply of high-quality beer in much larger quantities than you might be used to. You won’t be able to do that with whatever equipment an average person can fit into their home’s basement or backyard shed. You’ll need some serious brewery equipment if you want to make a real go at developing your brewery into something successful.

So, what is the most essential commercial brewery equipment? Your first thought likely considers the equipment that actually makes the beer the most important. While that is certainly true, there are plenty of other pieces of equipment that are practically a necessity for a successful brewery to thrive. This guide will take you through what pieces of equipment are absolutely necessary to have if you want to set up a commercial brewing operation.

Brewing Equipment

You won’t get far without the equipment that actually creates the beer itself. Once you have the ingredients you need, like the grains, the yeast, the hops, and whatever else you’re putting in your beer, it needs to go somewhere to start the brewing process. This is the crucial equipment you’ll need to mass-produce your beer for distribution.

Malt Mill

Milling the grain that you’ve chosen to use in your beer is the first step to brewing. A malt mill is a piece of equipment that will crush large amounts of grain all at once. Considering the vast quantities of grain that you’ll likely go through, you want something reliable, so it lasts you a long time and through many batches. You don’t want a mill that will simply obliterate your grain into particles that are too fine, as this can actually make your mash clump up and stick to the mash tun, resulting in even more issues later on.

Mash Tun

Speaking of the mash tun, it’s another essential piece of equipment for commercial brewing. A mash tun is temperature-controlled and allows you to mix your grain with water to produce the mash you’ll need. Mash tuns also heat the mixture, which helps to break down the grain’s starches and turn them into the sugars that you’ll need in order to actually make the beer alcoholic.

Boil Kettle

This piece of equipment is where the other ingredients of your beer get added into the mix. Specifically, your kettle is where you also add in the all-important hops. It’s inside this boil kettle that you’ll start to develop the final flavor of your beer. The heat and time spent inside the kettle will also affect the beer’s coloration and its scent. Many boil kettles have a whirlpool system that helps to remove solid particles from the liquid throughout the process.

Fermentation Tanks

When you’ve fully crafted the beer and added the base ingredients, your next step will be to move it into a fermentation tank, sometimes called a unitank, depending on the style. A commercial brewing operation will need quite a few of these, and they’ll need to be much larger to accommodate for the sheer quantity of beer you’re trying to produce. Here is where you add your yeast and transform the wort into actual beer. Fermenters are carefully controlled environments that help the yeast do its job of transforming sugar into alcohol.

Brite Tanks

Once the fermentation is finished, you’ll need a place to store it. For smaller operations, you can technically store beer in the fermentation tank. However, commercial breweries will need to free up those fermenters right away for new batches, so the beer can move into a brite tank for storage. Brite tanks aren’t just for storage, though, as the environment in a brite tank helps a fermented beer to carbonate quicker, allowing it to be packaged and consumed much sooner.

Miscellaneous Equipment

Up until this point, we’ve talked about the major pieces of equipment that you’ll need for a commercial brewing operation. But there are smaller pieces of equipment that play just as vital of a role as those large fermenters and tanks do. Some of this equipment is necessary for ensuring the best quality of beer, while others are necessary for moving the beer to different tanks or making distribution easier.

Filtration Equipment

Between the different tanks that you’ll have throughout your brewery, you’ll need to have the right technology that allows for proper filtration of your beer as you create it. One of the key reasons you need to take filtration seriously is because it removes yeast and other solids from your beer. While not all of these are inedible or will ruin the product, they may affect the taste in ways you don’t want or cause it to spoil more quickly if not removed early on.

Hydrometer

A hydrometer is one of your best tools for ensuring your beer is the quality you want it to be. Hydrometers help you measure the quantity of sugar in your wort or fermented beer. This also allows you to measure alcohol content and monitor the yeast’s progress throughout the fermentation. It’s an essential tool to use so you can always know if you need to adjust the environment the beer is in.

Kegs, Bottles, or Cans

Commercial breweries are about more than just serving customers who come in to visit. Distribution is a massive part of being a large commercial brewer. Ultimately, the decision as to how you’ll distribute your beer is up to you, but you’ll need to invest in some sort of distribution system if you want people to actually drink your product.

Cleaning Supplies

Cleaning and sanitation are absolutely crucial to a brewery’s success. Whether we’re talking about an automatic keg washing system or just getting the right chemicals to keep your tanks clean, you cannot afford to skip over the cleaning step of brewing. Not only is it necessary for the health of your consumers, but regular cleaning ensures that you get a higher-quality and more consistent final product.

If you’re looking to get serious about your brewery and need the best commercial beer brewing equipment around, Craftmaster Stainless is the name you can trust to help you out. Our experience creating high-quality brewing equipment will make sure that you have everything you need to grow and succeed for many years to come.