A brewery is a vessel building with a floor problem
Brewing is a sequence of vessels: mill, mash tun, lauter tun, kettle, whirlpool, fermenters, conditioning tanks. Each one is heavy, each one stands on a small footprint, and most of them are taller than they are wide.
That combination — heavy, concentrated, tall — is a structural question before it is anything else. The rest of the building follows from how those vessels are supported.
Vessel loads do not distribute
A fermenter full of wort can be a large mass on four or six legs. The load does not spread across the slab the way a racked pallet load does; it arrives at points.
If those points land on a suspended slab, the slab has to be designed for them and so does everything carrying the slab. If they land at grade on an isolated foundation, the building frame is relieved of the job entirely — which is usually the cheaper answer even though it looks less tidy on a drawing.
The question to settle early is whether the tank farm is inside the building or beside it. Inside means the frame has to accommodate the vessels and their removal route. Beside it means the building can be simpler and the vessels can be replaced without touching the roof.
Cleaning in place puts caustic on the floor every day
Tanks are cleaned in place with hot caustic and then rinsed. The volumes are large, the chemicals are aggressive, and the process repeats daily for the life of the plant.
For a steel building this matters at three places: the slab surface, the column bases, and any steel within splash height. None of those are addressed by choosing a better coating on the roof.
What works is a slab with falls to a gully, a kerb or plinth at each column base so the steel never sits in a puddle, and a coating system selected for the actual chemical rather than for "food industry".
Tall vessels need headroom that is hard to add later
A kettle or a whirlpool is tall, and the space above it is needed for the vessel top, the pipework and the access. Eave height chosen from a floor plan rather than from a vessel elevation is the most common way a brewery building ends up wrong.
The same applies to the removal route. A vessel that was lifted in through an unfinished roof cannot be replaced through a finished one. If the plant expects to swap tanks, the envelope needs an opening that is designed rather than improvised.
Steam and carbon dioxide behave differently
The kettle produces steam, which wants to leave at high level. Fermentation produces carbon dioxide, which is heavier than air and collects at low level.
These two requirements pull in opposite directions — high-level openings for steam, low-level ventilation for gas — and a building detailed for only one of them will be uncomfortable in one room and unsafe in another. Fermentation rooms in particular are usually treated as a ventilation design problem with a building around it.
What I want before drawings
- The vessel schedule with masses, support arrangements and heights.
- Whether the vessels are inside the frame or in an adjacent structure.
- The cleaning regime and the chemicals used.
- The removal route for a vessel, and whether replacement is expected.
- How the fermentation room is ventilated, and by whom that is designed.
- The wind speed for the site in km/h from the applicable local code, not a round number.
A brewery building that gets the vessel supports and the floor right is a straightforward project. One that treats the tanks as equipment placed after the fact is a sequence of expensive changes.
Written by Johnny Joe, who advises owners and project managers in Africa and South America on steel buildings. If this decision is live on a project, send the layout and the constraint that worries you and I will tell you what it changes.
Related: the wet hall downstream · point loads on small footprints · corrosion class as a selection input · when a machine floor is added inside
