Installation and maintenance of universal tanks in small-scale breweries

The most famous yeast is beer yeast. In the fermentation stage of producing beer, yeast converts sug-ars into alcohol. A significant factor is the amount of oxygen present during beer fermentation. In the absence of oxygen, conditions are more favourable, and more alcohol can be formed at the end. In contrast, increasing the amount of oxygen leads to bacterial growth and an overall deterioration in fermentation. That is why fermentation is done in impenetrable reservoirs (fermentation tanks). The proper installation and maintenance of fermentation-storage tanks is an essential step to provide effi-cient and healthy fermentation of the beer and its further storage before being bottled and delivered to the customer. The main purpose of this thesis was to summarize and evaluate all the installation and designing work done of the universal tanks in the Kahakka Brewery, located in Kokkola. From the beginning of the year 2021, Kahakka brewery started to expand its production capacities. The amount of the produced beer wanted to be increased three times greater than before. To achieve that, five new universal tanks were ordered with 3000L volume each. The complete process of the brewery expansion involved earlier planning and design of the facility space for the new tanks’ locations, installation of the tanks in place, and making brand new glycol cooling line for each of them. As the last stages, testing of the system was done with the necessary troubleshooting processes and further sanitization and preparation of the tanks for their first fill. The project was finished in the middle of March 2021. Since the installation, all tanks operate normal-ly. However, a couple of issues could not be fully resolved, including the cooling line welds and in-complete proper insulation, which creates heat loses during cooling processes. In addition, because of common connections and the same glycol chiller, existing and new cooling lines had inconsistencies in the proper circulation of glycol and, therefore, in the accurate cooling of a particular tank at given temperatures. This problem was partially solved using a one-way check valve