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Please help with Brewery Layout


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I am building a brewery on my  Granby layout. I doubt if knowledge of beer is confined to GWR enthusiasts so in order to appeal for information from a wider audience I thought I would start a separate thread

 

Unfortunately, while not unfamiliar with the product itself......I have little or no idea how it is made

Back in September, Doug (Chubber) of this parish sent me a really useful Brewery link :

https://content.historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/brewing-industry/bhs-brewing-ind-shier.pdf/

Its well worth reading, not just for the illustrated history of the architecture and development of smaller Victorian breweries, but also for a succinct summary of the brewing process. It certainly gave me some useful ideas.

My old brewery was built in 2010 using Metcalfe kits



post-465-0-81223100-1510939035.jpg

 

I did contemplate re-using some of the buildings but decided against it. They are very attractive models but perhaps a little small for Granby. They have become so popular that they are immediately recognisable. I wanted something a little different.


Scalescene Warehouse kits are very flexible and I think I can create that sense of mass so typical of Victorian buildings:

 

 

post-465-0-35681700-1510939052_thumb.jpg


Within the confines of the site and allowing for the modular nature of Scalescene Warehouse I intend to make two principal buildings. A warehouse/bottling plant that will be three stories high and a brewhouse that will be narrower and taller with 5 stories.


There will be assorted ancillary buildings….Cooperage, Boiler House, Water Tower etc but these will come later.


Here is the track layout and some scale mock ups

 

post-465-0-65370300-1510939064_thumb.jpg

 

 

post-465-0-84651800-1510939082_thumb.jpg

 

 

post-465-0-34470400-1510939100_thumb.jpg

 

 

post-465-0-53972600-1510939124_thumb.jpg

 

 

 

The modified Metcalfe unit, on the left, will serve as the Brewer's House, Offices and the Brewery Tap.


Right now I need advice and input on where the various brewing processes would be allocated to the two principal buildings


From the link I have summarised the distinct processes as follows


Malting:  Barley is steeped in water for 3 days. The germinated barley is turned and dried 7-14 days and then roasted All this took place in a   separate building. Some breweries had a Maltings on site, others bought the malted grain in.

I dont think I have enough space for a separate Malting building so the malt barley will be bought in

Milling       Malt Barley ….Milled and ground …... Grist

Mashing    Grist mixed with hot water in Mash Tun. Mixture stays in tun at controlled temperature for 2-3 hours to become  wort

Boiling the Wort       Wort is run off, mixed with Hops and boiled in a Copper for two hours

Cooling the Wort      Wort is sieved (hop waste is sold) and cooled

Fermentation            Yeast added and fermented for three days in large open containers (wood/copper/stone )
                                   Surplus yeast is skimmed off and sold

Racking                    Beer run off from fermenting vessels into conditioning tanks. Finings clear any remaining yeast

                                 Finally transferred to Barrels or bottled.

The brewhouses or towers were designed to to take advantage of gravity…...raw materials were hauled to the top using a sack hoist along with water pumped from a tower or reservoir. On completion of a process it was dropped down to the next floor finishing up with beer ready to be bottled/barrelled on the ground floor.

And yet…..some of these processes require significant ventilation…... cooling the wort (in the middle of the cycle) according to the document was sited near the top of the tower for just that purpose

I am not proposing to have highly detailed interiors but I need to have a rough idea of where the processes would likely have taken place in the configuration I am planning. This will dictate whether I have windows or vents and at what floor I locate the external corridor connecting the two buildings that will convey both product and people etc..

Right now I am guessing on the following:


                                                               WAREHOUSE                                                            BREW HOUSE


Floor 5 (Tower)                                                      NA                                                                         Mashing


Floor 4                                                                   NA                                                                      Boiling the Wort


Floor 3                                                            Conditioning                          Corridor                      Cooling the Wort


Floor 2                                                           Racking/Bottling                                                          Fermentation


Ground                                                         Storage and Distribuition                                        Receiving and Milling



Total guesswork I am afraid…….. I would really appreciate any advice.

 


Best wishes from Vancouver


John

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John,

 

Hopefully the following might help - there’s a lot of stuff going up and down and being transferred around with this!

For your malt barley, it would be probably be delivered at ground level into a hopper connected to a conveyor and then carried up the milling tower in an elevator and dumped in the feed conveyor. This would then carry it across the top of the malt silos, where it would be loaded into whichever ones it was needed. From here the malt would then be discharged when needed from the bottom of the silo into another conveyor and elevator at ground level that carries it back up the mill tower. It now drops down through a weigher into the mill and is ground into the grist. It now falls into yet another elevayor that takes it all the way back up the tower again and now dumps it into the grist bin. When needed it is discharged from here it a screw conveyor that carries it into the mash tun where it is mixed with the hot water. I’ve added a little sketch to try and make all that hopefully make sense!

 

The wort will be transferred from the mash tun into the wash backs for fermentation. These generally have their bases at ground level and their tops at first floor level within a separate room - the tun room. Access to the lower tun room is usually restricted because of the presence of CO2. The solid waste (draff) from the mashing process is dumped out of the bottom of the mash tun and is taken off site for use in animal feed.

post-7069-0-21810200-1510941809_thumb.jpeg

Edited by chris-shay
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You also need to add hops to the mash. Hops are mostly grown in East Sussex, Kent and Herefordshire

 

The other thing is the period, as this affects the way the base products are handled. In Victorian buildings the base ingredients were mostly moved manually.

 

Unfortunately you are a little far away to get a trip around the St Austell Brewery.

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I had a tour around the Shipstones brewery in Nottingham many years ago when it was still in operation. There was quite a lot more going on than just brewing, which used lots of copper tanks, pans and pipework. I don't remember seeing too much stainless steel. Malt was delivered from their own maltings at the side of the railway at Beeston about 5 or 6 miles away, next to Beeston station.

 

There was a bottling plant, stables for the shire horses that pulled the drays, a blacksmiths for shoeing the horses and general maintenance and they manufactured and repaired their own wooden barrels - a fascinating process to watch. The shire horses were still being used for local deliveries but mostly deliveries were by lorries (trucks), there must also have been garage facilities for these.

 

Sadly the brewery closed some years ago but the Victorian? buildings remain and are in use for other business's, including an auctioneers.

Edited by smokebox
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Thanks for the advice and information guys......very helpful. I particularly appreciated your Sketch Chris......It was very kind of you to take the trouble to do that and it has given me a much clearer insight into the extent of the vertical and lateral movement during the brewing process........many thanks

 

Best wishes to all

 

John 

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Get on a brewery tour!

 

I’ve been to n several, and they are very interesting ...... although I’ve forgotten how beer is made, due to the amount of sampling involved!

 

Hook Norton is probably the best I’ve been to, but Harvey’s in Lewes is good, and their beer is better.

 

PS: I’ve just realised where you are ....... Long trip, but worth it.

Edited by Nearholmer
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Wychwood Brewery in Witney, home of the likes of Hobgoblin Ale, the Brewery is right in the middle of town and as can be seen from the picture below, quite a compact site. No bottling plant though, the Ale is actually bottled in Burton-on-Trent!

(Well worth a tour if you like your Ale, samples are tasted both before and after the tour.)

 

post-6818-0-42982900-1511131476_thumb.jpeg

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  • RMweb Gold

Get on a brewery tour!

 

I’ve been to n several, and they are very interesting ...... although I’ve forgotten how beer is made, due to the amount of sampling involved!

 

Hook Norton is probably the best I’ve been to, but Harvey’s in Lewes is good, and their beer is better.

 

PS: I’ve just realised where you are ....... Long trip, but worth it.

 

Somebody else pointed me towards Hook Norton. Their web site is full of really useful information which hopefully I can transpose into model form. The whole place looks so atttractive its on the bucket list for when we visit the UK in 2019.......so we will be making the long trip after all!

 

Cheers

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I am building a brewery on my  Granby layout. I doubt if knowledge of beer is confined to GWR enthusiasts so in order to appeal for information from a wider audience I thought I would start a separate thread

 

Unfortunately, while not unfamiliar with the product itself......I have little or no idea how it is made

 

Back in September, Doug (Chubber) of this parish sent me a really useful Brewery link :

 

https://content.historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/brewing-industry/bhs-brewing-ind-shier.pdf/

 

Its well worth reading, not just for the illustrated history of the architecture and development of smaller Victorian breweries, but also for a succinct summary of the brewing process. It certainly gave me some useful ideas.

 

My old brewery was built in 2010 using Metcalfe kits

 

 

attachicon.gif1 Brewery .jpg

 

I did contemplate re-using some of the buildings but decided against it. They are very attractive models but perhaps a little small for Granby. They have become so popular that they are immediately recognisable. I wanted something a little different.

 

 

Scalescene Warehouse kits are very flexible and I think I can create that sense of mass so typical of Victorian buildings:

 

 

attachicon.gif4a Scalescene.jpg

 

 

Within the confines of the site and allowing for the modular nature of Scalescene Warehouse I intend to make two principal buildings. A warehouse/bottling plant that will be three stories high and a brewhouse that will be narrower and taller with 5 stories.

 

 

There will be assorted ancillary buildings….Cooperage, Boiler House, Water Tower etc but these will come later.

 

 

Here is the track layout and some scale mock ups

 

attachicon.gif5 B track 2 .jpg

 

 

attachicon.gif6 Plan.jpg

 

 

attachicon.gif7 Mockup.jpg

 

 

attachicon.gif8 Mockup close up.jpg

 

 

 

The modified Metcalfe unit, on the left, will serve as the Brewer's House, Offices and the Brewery Tap.

 

 

Right now I need advice and input on where the various brewing processes would be allocated to the two principal buildings

 

 

From the link I have summarised the distinct processes as follows

 

 

Malting:  Barley is steeped in water for 3 days. The germinated barley is turned and dried 7-14 days and then roasted All this took place in a   separate building. Some breweries had a Maltings on site, others bought the malted grain in.

 

I dont think I have enough space for a separate Malting building so the malt barley will be bought in

 

Milling       Malt Barley ….Milled and ground …... Grist

 

Mashing    Grist mixed with hot water in Mash Tun. Mixture stays in tun at controlled temperature for 2-3 hours to become  wort

 

Boiling the Wort       Wort is run off, mixed with Hops and boiled in a Copper for two hours

Cooling the Wort      Wort is sieved (hop waste is sold) and cooled

 

Fermentation            Yeast added and fermented for three days in large open containers (wood/copper/stone )

                                   Surplus yeast is skimmed off and sold

 

Racking                    Beer run off from fermenting vessels into conditioning tanks. Finings clear any remaining yeast

 

                                 Finally transferred to Barrels or bottled.

 

The brewhouses or towers were designed to to take advantage of gravity…...raw materials were hauled to the top using a sack hoist along with water pumped from a tower or reservoir. On completion of a process it was dropped down to the next floor finishing up with beer ready to be bottled/barrelled on the ground floor.

 

And yet…..some of these processes require significant ventilation…... cooling the wort (in the middle of the cycle) according to the document was sited near the top of the tower for just that purpose

 

I am not proposing to have highly detailed interiors but I need to have a rough idea of where the processes would likely have taken place in the configuration I am planning. This will dictate whether I have windows or vents and at what floor I locate the external corridor connecting the two buildings that will convey both product and people etc..

 

Right now I am guessing on the following:

 

 

                                                               WAREHOUSE                                                            BREW HOUSE

 

 

Floor 5 (Tower)                                                      NA                                                                         Mashing

 

 

Floor 4                                                                   NA                                                                      Boiling the Wort

 

 

Floor 3                                                            Conditioning                          Corridor                      Cooling the Wort

 

 

Floor 2                                                           Racking/Bottling                                                          Fermentation

 

 

Ground                                                         Storage and Distribuition                                        Receiving and Milling

 

 

 

Total guesswork I am afraid…….. I would really appreciate any advice.

 

Best wishes from Vancouver

 

 

John

 

John

The top floor was normally used for Wort cooling if horizontal coolers were used, but if Vertical coolers were used then the top floor would have the Hot Liquor tanks and grist bin and wort receiver, ( water in breweries is used for washing down, Hot and Cold liquor is used for brewing)

In most cases the grist bin was mounted directly above the Mashing machine which was built into the top of the Mash Tun cover or in a wooden topped Tun sitting on the edge of the Tun

Hot liquor and Grist were mixed together in the mashing machine at the correct brewing temperature.

After the mashing time had elapsed the wort was rum off through the false bottom plates to a tap box down to the Copper, here the Hops were added normally by hand, after the boil off was complete the Copper was Cast into the Hop Back and allowed to settle, again the wort was drained off through the false bottom plates and pumped to the horizontal coolers if used or to a wort receiver if vertical coolers were used and the fed by gravity to the Fermenting vessels where yeast was added.

As yeast grows during fermentation there is always excess yeast, before modern bottom fermenting yeast were invented the spare yeast was collected by lorries and went to make Marmite.

Before the advent of Stainless Steel every thing in breweries was either Copper or Brass, it used to take approx. 6 weeks to make a Copper and about the same to make a Copper Mash tun cover. I know I have made a few!

Of course all that has now changed and breweries are built on two levels and the wort etc is all pumped.

Tim

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  • RMweb Gold

Thanks again guys for all the information......much appreciated.

 

I am getting a much clearer idea of what goes where......and a load of places I would like to visit......always provided I can convince Mrs D

 

Best Wishes

 

John

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A couple of other possibilities, I you are staying in the south of England:

 

- Adnam's Sole Bay brewery at Southwold in Suffolk; and,

 

- Fuller's Griffin Brewery at Chiswick, which is probably the nearest to Central London, if you stay there.

 

I'd still say that Hook Norton is tops fo its location and the originality of the building, followed closely by Harvey's.

 

There was another extremely good one not fa south of Guildford (at Hindhead?), but I can't remember who owned it, and can no longer find reference to it, so maybe it's closed.

 

Kevin

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Try a Google image search of railways around Burton on Trent, the town was riddled with rail connected brewery buildings and there are some wonderful back street scenes worth copying.

This book covers mainline and some of the brewery lines, with good maps and b&w pictures

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Railways-around-Burton-Trent/dp/1899624287

This book is out of print but still around, at a price!

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/brewery-railways-of-burton-on-trent/author/cliff-shepherd/first-edition/

post-13564-0-74315400-1511362705.jpg

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