Recommendations for commercial fabricators/installers

Afternoon,

I'm currently in the planning stages of (hopefully) setting up a small micro (nano?) brewery in my village. I'm at the point of doing fairly detailed costings and obviously the biggest item is the brewery itself.

I've heard a lot of good things about Dave Porter at PBC, but does anyone have any experience, good or bad, with either PBC or any of the other manufacturers? Brewing vessels ltd, Johnson's, Brewery Equip, Micro-Brew, brewmaster etc...

We have a PBC kit. They have a reputation for cheap and cheerful, plus if anything goes wrong after installation don't expect much help. Spares expensive so better to source them yourself. But it is functional - had to install a CIP on ours using a fermenter which is gradually rotting the wood lid of the copper. Otherwise generally a decent little kit I guess. Hard to brew 3-4bbl on a 6bbl as the cooling is situated right in the middle of the fermenter rather than around, but you can remedy that if you want. Also have to budge the pumps around on brewdays so I can pump cold water from a reservoir into the HLT to get a good cooling speed.

Pallet brew was a bit wonky for me, mash filter was shite and regularly blocked pumps, pumps overpowered for 1bbl kit, copper on kettle so couldn't caustic brew, and no outlet for excess from the mash tun during cooling - valve in wrong place to underlet on mash tun. Tech hose quickly degraded which was dangerous - also had to heat sparge water after mash water as insufficient hlt volume. Weird kit.

You are welcome to view our kit if you want or even join me for a brew day, we are just south of Birmingham.

Cheers Rob.

I'm doing the PBC course in April, so hopefully I'll get a good look at their kit then.

Those pallet set ups look like a good deal, but do seem a bit cobbled together.

Here's another one.
http://micro-brew.co.uk/wp-content/uplo ... y-spec.pdf

It seems like a good idea, but so far i can't find anyone who's actually used one.


I've had a short e mail exchange with these chaps.
http://www.breweriesforsale.co.uk/

The breweries look amazing, but some of their blurb is decidedly suspect. they quote £65 costs for a 9 cask brew. That works out at 10p a pint, which is clearly wrong. But when I contacted them to ask about it, all he said was "do your own research".


I might take you up on that offer of a brew day. I'm hoping to take a week off work a bit late in the year to do a bit of hands on experience. It would be brilliant to be able to visit 5 different breweries and see 5 different brew days.

I was chatting to one of the people behind Advanced Brewing/Advanced Bottling UK ( https://www.advancedbrewing.co.uk/ http://www.abuk.co.uk/brewing.html ) at a homebrew club the other night and they definitely sound like a decent company.

I would assume £65 must be before duty at least. Each cask costs us around £45 inc everything so about £400 for that many casks.

Research,research and honest opinions from current users of these kits is the only way to go. When setting up a commercial brewery you need to look at things like how easy is it to ramp up production

I would recommend the microbrewery handbook https://www.amazon.co.uk/Microbrewers-H ... y+handbook good bit of reading with stuff lie tax and how to set out a business plan

I was calculating about £40 a cask, so it's good to know I'm in the right area.

Their website clearly stated that £65 included everything. It's fine if it's a mistake, which it clearly is, but the guy's attitude really put me off.

Cheers, I've read that book to death.

This company specialises in brewery builds .
They are based in Swindon.

http://esfabrications.co.uk/