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Comment by huherto | Hacker News Reader

> Brewing large batches is hard. Even transitioning from 5 gallon to 10 gallon batches requires different equipment. Recipes don't scale in a simple way. And when you get into backwatering high gravity beers everything becomes even more complex.

As an ignorant software engineer. I have to ask this. ¿Can you keep the batch size constant and increase the number of batches?

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Generally speaking, the cost of scaling beer production is paid once. You need bigger, more expensive brewing equipment (and can't just repurpose mass-produced consumer items like turkey fryers and drink coolers) and the recipes have to be adjusted to the new capacity and setup, but your unit cost is much, much lower.

Surface area doesn't scale linearly with capacity, so both cost and cleaning time actually get _better_ as you scale up. Grain, cleaning supplies, and tools get cheaper as you scale, too.

It also only takes a tiny active culture of something bad to ruin an entire batch of beer. Each vessel, airlock, valve, and spoon is another potential source of contamination, so having fewer things to clean is a Good Thing.

You could probably do something like that, but it'd be a huge waste of time. The time to brew a batch is pretty much the same no matter the volume. I.E. Brewing a 5 gallon batch takes about the same amount of time as brewing 20 gallons, assuming you have the equipment capable of doing that volume.

I think huherto is suggesting beer concurrency. That is, instead of having a 20 gallon setup, having four 5 gallon setups. It will take longer because you will have to do whatever mixing,testing, etc four times but if the longest part of the process is waiting- you win in that aspect.

The question is- would this make it easier to be more consistent?

As a homebrewer I think this would be a pretty rough way to try and scale. The actual brew time would be the same, but you've increased your cleaning and maintenance significantly, you need a solution to pipe from multiple stations into fermenting vessels, you need a significant amount of extra space dedicated to brewing that could otherwise be used for fermentation vessels, etc.

I think the right answer is to get your equipment and do test batches to rework your recipes at scale. If you're successful as a brewery it's a process you'll have to do multiple times as you grow anyways, so avoiding it once seems like a silly optimization.

Thanks latj, this is what I was thinking. Big batches may be a good model for a large brewery but not necessarily for a small one that is growing organically.

I can imagine several advantages. You can replicate without having to extrapolate quantities, pressure, etc. You get to run more experiments, I can envision a supervised machine learning system that learns which parameters make the best beer. You don't throw out big batches, etc. Sure, it may require more labor, but you get other advantages.

How about a coop of home brewers- everyone agrees to brew a certain recipe of beer that month; All the beer gets blended together and redistributed. What does that taste like?

I visited a village once that did this with their wine and distilled liquor.

Take a look into the sherry making process if you can find a good resource. The (highly generalised) idea is to use several batches created yearly say, so that by the time you have made seven batches for example, the first batch is fully matured. You siphon off half of the first batch and this is your starter - it tells you the character of the finished product, but only really hints at what you'll get. Now you take each batch and tow it down the line, taking half the second batch and topping up the first and so on until you are left to top up your most immature batch. By the time you've got this working as a production line the consistency of the final product will be pretty solid. Personally I can't stand sherry, though.

I'm at work and don't have access to my brewing books so I can't be any more specific than this but I found it an interesting solution to the problem of consistency.

It's referred to as a Solera, and it's more for making a product consistent over a timespan of years. Non-vintage champagne is also blended together for consistency. As is scotch (even the single malts are usually blends of multiple years). The Solera is slightly different in that the wine is commingled over the course of years, whereas in most champagne and whiskey production the blending is done just before bottling. Some beers that are aged are blended (rodenbach comes to mind), and even Budweiser gets blended together from different tanks to ensure the end result is consistently "Budweiser".

That's exactly it, cheers for that - the brewing book I use mentions it's a traditional method but seems to imply for Sherry, but maybe I'm just not remembering correctly. Thanks for clearing it up. I'm in half a mind to set one up for my elderflower champagne (the hard stuff ~16%ABV). But this year I'm just going to focus on method and produce as many small batches as I can.

Most important thing that comes to my mind is space. I have no idea about the size occupied by a single "batch" but I can say that two small ones require more space. One more thing is, maintaining one large "reactor" is easy when compared to 10 small ones.

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