Building brewhouse-cellar

Building brewhouse-cellar

For homebrewing you need quite a lot of room – just try it in your kitchen and you’ll see. My goal was to brew mainly lagers, which adds the problem of maintaining low temperatures for lagering. I brewed twice on the terrace and it was not comfortable: storing equipment each time, no good storage space, and making a mess on the wooden terrace.

For that year I had planned to build a 15 m³ rainwater container (for toilet flushing and garden irrigation). The obvious question came up naturally: “If I am already digging such a big hole in the ground, why not make it bigger and build a small cellar and brewing room there?”

Layout

The structure consists of three connected spaces:

1. Rainwater tank – ~15 m³ capacity
2. Mini cellar – temperature-controlled space for lagering
3. Brewing room – space for the actual brewing equipment

The cellar contains fermenters and lagering tanks. Cooling is achieved by recirculating cooling liquid through a fridge and coils in the fermenters.

The original plan was a cellar floor at 3 m depth, but underground water appeared during excavation at 2.4 m, so the floor is at 2.1 m.

Advantages

• Cooling with rainwater – simply recirculate rainwater through a cooling coil to cool the room effectively in summer
• Great water supply for cleaning and washing brewing equipment
• Pitching-temperature water on tap

Price

Total: ~1800 USD. All work except excavator was done DIY.

• Tags:
• Homebrewing