Brewery, Winery, Distillery and Food Industry Tanks

Many companies, when building new tank installations, will use stainless steel tanks for the storage and production of food and beverages, undeniably these are an ideal solution provided that there is sufficient budget available.

However many older installations use carbon steel and other types of tanks and these are usually lined with an epoxy or phenolic resin tank lining system. Additionally, there are still many vitreous enamel lined tanks in use. Tanks made from fibreglass are also still widely used in wine and cider and fruit juice production.

The various tank lining materials, and the methods used to apply them have served well over the years but these linings, will, unfortunately, inevitably be subject to some degree of accidental damage.

A defective or damaged tank whose lining may have cracks, chips or pitting on the surface (or perhaps tanks with no lining at all) can be notoriously difficult to clean. These damaged surfaces may harbour bacteria and encourage the growth of microbial organisms, which in turn risk contamination of the food or drink product being produced – potentially creating “off” flavours in beer for example.

The damage to these linings may be attributed to any one of a number of causes:

• Over tightening of tank manway doors
• Opening manway doors inwards without rubber seal in place damaging tank wall
• Dropping tools and/or fittings inside tanks
• During cleaning and sterilization processes
• Mechanical alterations being made to the tank, including welding related repairs
• The incorrect use of chemicals and under/over fluid temperatures
• Over pressurising a tank
• Insufficient venting employed during emptying

The question is do you look at:

• Replace the defective tanks with new tanks?
• Carry out localised repairs to the damaged area?
• Have the tank professionally re-lined?

Replacing defective tanks can often be impractical and possibly hugely expensive.

A local repair may work well enough for a time but is often not satisfactory and may need repeating regularly with the associated lost production cost.

Many of our clients have found that having their tank linings professionally repaired/refurbished has not only provided huge long term cost advantages (up to 90% less than a complete tank replacement) but has on average extended the life of their re-lined tanks by up to 30 years.

Brewery Tank Lining

In our experience the area’s most prone to damage in brewery tanks are the floors and lower walls adjacent to the man way entrance. Older linings can also blister, as points of underlying corrosion start to erupt and in extreme cases, tanks may need to be taken out of service, resulting in costly replacements, lost product, and expensive downtime.

Specialist Coatings provides a highly effective, rapid, and permanent localised repair or full lining service as needed. Before considering the cost and inconvenience of replacing or lining your entire tank, we strongly advise that you invite us to undertake a full inspection to ascertain the type and extent of the remedial work required.

We have highly effective, tried, and tested repair and re-lining processes to remediate cracks, craters, pitting and other forms of damage to the tank or the tank lining. The repaired areas can be expected to last the life of the tank.

Our robust and durable tank linings use materials that are internationally approved for use in the food and beverage industry.

If the damage to the tank or lining is localised and does not necessitate a complete re-lining, a localised repair may be the most cost-effective approach. These localised repairs can be made either by us coming to site, or we can supply you with the materials, training, and technical support to enable you to do the work yourselves or for you to employ a local technician to do the work. This methodology may minimise overall downtime, saving on costs and inconvenience.

Brewery Tank Lining Repair Kits

We can carry out the work for you or we can supply you with tank lining repair kits, at a nominal cost, for your maintenance team to carry out the work inhouse. The tank lining repair kits enable localised repairs to be made to existing linings as and when required, and at the convenience of the brewery engineering department. Resin lined tanks in breweries often become damaged during the cleaning process or simply by general usage.

With correct surface preparation and application of materials carried out these repair kits will help to reduce the risk of bacterial growth and extend the practical working life of brewery process vessels /tanks by many years before any major relining works are required.

Wooden Fermentation Vats

Slate Fermentation

The presence of cracks and other fissures craters and pitting in the tank or the tank lining can all be repaired.

We have repaired and re-lined tanks made from the following materials.

Other areas in breweries where we have used our specialised coatings and knowledge of material application include:

• Specialist resin flooring systems for brewhouse & production areas (slip resistant, abrasion and chemical resistant)
• Bunded containment areas, linings for fuel and chemical bunds
• Air receiver tanks
• Cold liquor tanks
• Hot liquor tanks
• Fire hydrant sprinkler tanks
• Warehouse & production area floors
• Wastewater & effluent chambers

Over the years we have been involved with the relining, treating, and repairing of a huge number of brewery tanks and process vessels and fermentation vessels.

It must be now something in the region of more than 750,000m2. *

We have worked not only on carbon or mild steel tanks, but glass lined tanks and fibreglass tanks too. We have also worked on a great number of traditional slate vessels too. A slightly more difficult, but entirely surmountable challenge were some fermentation vats made from wooden timber staves.

We have created processes and repair methods for all of these.

This has enabled those brewery clients to minimise down-time and to continue to use existing tanks which otherwise were at risk of becoming unusable and redundant.

Overall, this has allowed the breweries to extend the practical working life of their existing tanks by many years.

We are currently working on the development of an exterior coating material to inhibit and potentially stop the growth of airborne molds on the outside of buildings located in the areas around the location of the production and storage of distilled spirits.

It is well known that whisky black does not actually exist, but if hypothetically it did or if there was a requirement in the future for a product for that could be used in relation to that, we are working on developing one.

Please contact us to discuss this further.

*In this and previous companies that I have been involved over the years.