The amber nectar. Liquid gold. The good stuff. Whatever your feelings towards beer, there’s no getting away from the fact that brewing is a complex labour of love that rewards mastery but has a habit of throwing a few nasty surprises your way.
As any experienced brewer will tell you, a good beer starts with the right ingredients. Choice malts, aromatic hops and clean, soft water and you’re already halfway to a pint of heaven. But after the source materials, the next most important factor must surely be the equipment used. Conditioning tanks to get the beer bottle-ready, chillers to prepare the liquor for fermentation, mash tuns to boil up a rich wort. But the key to starting off the process? A heat source – and in our case, a burner.
How Does a Burner Affect Beer Brewing?
If you’re in the business of making beer, then 1) thank you for your services to humanity and 2) you’ll know how thermal management is often the key to unlocking the best from your finely tuned process.
Temperature Accuracy
Heating to the right temperature is vital for various stages in the brewing process. For example, when boiling a wort to extract the necessary sugars from grain and facilitate later fermentation after the addition of yeast. Or, when heating a liquor during the hopping stage to infuse flavour and aroma into a brew. Ensuring control of the heating temperature is paramount for success in brewing of all types. A few degrees too hot or too cold could mean the difference between a sip of success or an unfortunate batch for the drain only.
Using a combustion heating solution that gives accurate temperature control can provide brewers with the confidence to not only produce their stock recipes with confidence and consistency but also allow for experimentation and exploration of the brewing process that might not otherwise happen without exacting temperature controls.
Temperature Stability
Once a specific temperature has been reached, the next challenge is keeping it there. With brewing inherently involving large volumes of liquid in not insubstantial vessels, there will always be a number of elements competing on a thermal level and potentially causing the all-important brew to fluctuate. The brewery itself, the environmental conditions at that time, the containers and equipment being used; all variables that might skew an in-progress beer and create problems with the final product.
Being able to maintain a stable temperature can help to create optimum conditions for the brewer to go about their craft safe in the knowledge that there will be few thermal swings to risk the brewing process or the quality of the final conditioned beer.
What Should I Consider When Choosing a Burner for Brewing?
While many combustion heating units are well-suited to brewing applications with few adaptations needed, there are still a number of factors to bear in mind when scoping out a burner solution.
Size of Brewery
Whether you have a single, modest tank doing all the work or a huge industrial unit housing 10 of them, you’ll need to make sure a burner installation is capable of meeting your overall heating requirements. Similarly, the burners you do choose need to be able to sufficiently heat each vessel – under-specification of a burner solution could cause you issues later down the line.
Ease of Use
It’s no good if you have the most accurate, efficient, stable tank heating burner in the business – if you don’t know how to operate it then it’s no help to anybody. Selecting a burner solution that allows for proper use on a consistent basis, without having to digest a 400-page manual, will allow you to focus on the more demanding parts of the brewing process.
Efficiency
Brewing is infamously a game of small margins, and with costs perennially on the rise it’s more important than ever to watch your overheads where you can. Burners that inhale the gas supply like it’s going out of fashion will only add to running expenses, so choosing an option that offers high levels of efficiency will potentially cause one less financial headache for your brewing business.
Reliability
It’s no good if your new burner helps you create the greatest beer of your career but then three months later develops a fault, packs in and ends up needing repair or, worse still, replacement. Opting for a combustion heating solution that delivers solid performance time after time gives you the peace of mind that you needn’t waste precious energy worrying about breakdown or other unnecessary halts in production.
Placement
Depending on the design used, it’s important that your burner is able to be installed in location which makes operation, servicing and repairs easy and stress-free. In Lanemark’s case, this is something our engineers will consider when carrying out a site survey. Be wary of awkward angles, elevated positions and contained areas that might pose difficulties when you’re in a tight spot and need fast turnaround on maintenance work.
Servicing
We highly recommend a regular burner servicing to both improve performance and extend the working lifespan of the componentry. Choosing a burner that offers easy accessibility, ready availability of spare parts and an efficient design can all contribute to assisting in the benefits of burner servicing.
Lanemark Tank Heating Burners
Our TX series tank heating burners have long been used in brewing applications, thanks to their efficient helical coil design and ease of maintenance. This range offers heat inputs from 15kW to 700kW, meaning it can cater for a wide range of brewing application requirements. The TX series comes in a variety of iterations covering:
- Different voltages
- Fuel types
- Control types (either HLT or gas and air modulating).
Give our team a call on +44 (0) 24 7635 2000 to discuss your brewing heating needs, or email us at sales@lanemark.com.
