The Walk In Cellar
To complement the bigger brewery we needed somewhere nice and cool to keep all the beer. The solution was to build a walk in cellar at the back of the brewery. Space was very tight but we managed to create a space about 3 foot by 10 foot. This was lined with polythene as a waterproof membrane and then clad with polystyrene on the walls and high density floating floor insulation on the floor and ceiling.
To maintain the temperature an air conditioning unit connected to a home-built temperature controller was fitted and set to maintain the temperature at an optimum of 14 degrees Celsius.
As the brew length increased it was getting impractical to continue to use the four gallon cornies. So what to do? Easy get bigger kegs! These were bought from Morrow Brothers near Preston along with the required connectors to plumb them in.
Also, as a bit of an experiment we got a second gas cylinder from my Messrs. agent. This one was a 'Nitro' cylinder with a 60/40 Nitrogen/Carbon Dioxide mix. This is the same that it used in pubs for 'Smooth Flow' beers. As of yet we've not yet cracked the method of getting the tight thick head familiar with these beers.
Now we could have set all these taps and kegs up on the same regulator setup that was used in the original brewery but where's the fun in that. We found a supplier of old pub equipment and got some bits through Ebay which enabled us to create a gas setup that means each keg can have its pressure set independently. These pipes then go through the wall to the beer fonts on the bar. They're insulated to try and reduce the 'fobbing' caused by beer getting warm in the pipes.
On the whole this set up works well although there's usually a few more kegs in there at one time. Makes things a bit tight especially with the 50 litres sanky kegs. One trick we found was to fill the kegs up in-situ, saves a lot of lifting.