Opinion Of The Suitable Expansion Path For Brewhouse

Question about the brewery.
What do you think is the best expansion path for a brewery? I recently visited a brewery with five vessels, a mash tun,water tun, wort receiver, kettle and whirlpool. i think as you expand, some of the vessels can have different roles.

Regarding considering expanding the capacity of the brewery, here are our comments.

First, I suspect that the five vessel brewhouse you visited should be larger, say 3000L-5000L/brew.
With larger volumes (usually over 5000L), one usually has higher expectations/demands for its potential expansion capacity. For example, 4-5 batches/24 hours is a common scenario for such volumes.

This is to take full advantage of such a large brewhouse. Expanding on an existing brewpub is a much smaller budget than replacing it with a new, larger brewpub. The advantage of this budget difference is not obvious for smaller breweries, which are more flexible and easier to replace. For example.

If we completely replace our 1500L brewery with a 3000L brewery, we need an additional budget of about $47,000; if we expand our production capacity by adding additional containers to our 1500L brewery, we need an additional budget of about $10,000, so for a small brewery, we save $37,000 by adding additional containers rather than replacing a new, larger brewery.

If we replace a 5,000L brewhouse with a 10,000L brewhouse, we need about $200,000; if we just add additional containers, we need about $30,000, so we can save about $170,000 by adding additional containers over replacing the new brewhouse. That’s the reason for the budget and shows that it’s more necessary for larger breweries to have more containers rather than replacing them with a new, larger volume.

Second, let’s say we brew beer four times a day in four 1500L brew houses and four 5000L brew houses. We get more beer at the 5000L brewery (more beer means more profit), but the hours of work and employee wages are similar to the 1500L brewery. For the 1500L brewery, we work similar hours to the 5000L brewery, but with less beer.
So, in terms of “give” and “take”, the 5000L brewery is more worthwhile (and more economical), isn’t it?
So this explains why larger breweries are more necessary to have more containers.

So, on the subject of finding the best way to expand a brewery, this is just our opinion.

Take for example

1200 liter brewhouse project.
A straight swap to a 2,400 liter brewhouse. We don’t think it’s worth working long hours every day to brew 3-4 times because you’ll be paying more employees, so we think it’s better to just replace the brewhouse.

15 barrel brewery – 20 barrel brewery.
To save on workload and wages – in the future just replace the brewhouse with a 30bbl or 40bbl brewhouse. Or to save on equipment budget – build a 4 vessel brewhouse in advance.

Breweries with 30bbl or more. Build 4 vessel or 5 vessel brewhouse in advance for future expansion. Some customers want to leave ports ahead of time to add more containers in the future.

We hope this is helpful to you. We manufacture beer brewing equipment from 100L-10,000L/time.