March 13, 2005
A veritable cornucopia of tanks
I had written about our second large-capacity tank earlier. I was still looking for one more — something smaller that I could use for batches of specialty beverages, Mead, Melomel and Cyser. For the Mead and Melomel, wrestling with raw honey in 55 gallon drums is an “interesting” materials handling challenge so it would be better if the tank had a large opening. I can put the drum in a sling, hoist it and move it over the tank to pour it in.
I was reading a local buy-sell weekly newspaper can ran into this classified advertisement:
Jen and I went to look at it today and found a tank that is a little larger than I was looking for (it is about 1,500 gallons) but is open top and will work well for us.
The owner had bought an ex-dairy farm from an elder couple who were retiring and the equipment had been sitting idle for several years (the present owner does Horses). The icing on the cake was that a lot of the original stainless steel tubing was available too. We will need to retrofit a lot of it with Tri-Clover fittings (the existing hardware is an earlier version but not compatible) but with the price of raw stainless, this will get us going very nicely.
Here are some pictures:
Click for full-size Image
Here is the new tank. There are
four large hatches that lift up for access.
Click for full-size Image
Here is the motor for the agitator.
Click for full-size Image
The refrigeration compressor — looks to be in
good condition but no idea if it is running
the old (nasty) Freon or the newer refrigerants.
Oh yeah - the kicker to this story is that the owner was giving me directions to get to their place and the route and street names got more and more familiar… Their property is right next door to the tank in the other story. They share a property line! Talk about coincidence…
The Cidery is getting equipped and coming closer to opening!!!
Posted by DaveH at March 13, 2005 08:53 PM | TrackBack