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Gear Test 2017: Brite Tanks & Packaging

In our 2017 Gear Guide issue (April/May), our editors tested and reviewed a homebrew-scaled brite tank and two products that help with packaging your beer. Here are the results.

Jul 5, 2017 - 5 min read

Gear Test 2017: Brite Tanks & Packaging Primary Image

In our 2017 Gear Guide issue (April/May), our editors tested and reviewed a homebrew-scaled brite tank and two products that help with packaging your beer. Here are the results.

Ss Brewtech Brite Tank

The one piece of homebrew gear we never knew we needed

Test lab notes

There’s a really good reason that all professional breweries have brite tanks. The vessel is built specifically to drop temperature, carbonate your beer, settle out any remaining particulates, free up a fermentor, blend batches, and serve beer. The Ss Brewtech Brite Tank (above, center) is designed based on those pro vessels to allow you to achieve those same functions. Before testing, we questioned whether we needed one since we have a keezer for serving and dropping particulates, and our fermentors space is not at a premium, so we put it to the test. We racked a beer into the brite tank, crashed it, cleared the remaining particulates, carbonated, and served/packaged directly out of the tank. That experience was great—easy to do, cleared the beer, and it was done with far more style than we could in the past.

Once the beer was in the tank, we blended with a second beer at ~15 percent volume. After completing the blend, we added about an ounce of hops and tasted it a day later; it was exactly the beer we wanted to build.

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Overall, the brite tank was a fantastic piece of equipment to add to our system, which enabled us to enhance and blend beers in a way that we could not before. The only change we would look for (in a Brewmaster Edition, hint hint) is welded fittings; as a part of our test we cranked it up to 40 psi without issue, but if you knock any of the valves at pressure, there’s a chance of minor leaks.

Scorecard

Easy to Use? X
Easy to Sanitize? X
Build Quality? X
Enjoyment? X
High Value?

Price: $495
Manufacturer: Ss Brewtech
Available from: ssbrewtech.com

Blichmann QuickCarb

Test lab notes

Saving an extra 2 days for carbonation out of a 22-day brewing cycle might not seem like much—we were skeptical at first—but now that we’ve used the QuickCarb (above, left), that assumption is gone, and we carbonate on the day we keg and love it. The QuickCarb is straightforward (once you get the hang of it), easy to clean, and Blichmann has nailed down all the details.

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For testing sake, we tried to go straight off the fermentor into bottles to see if we could skip the keg altogether. It didn’t work. Once we read and followed the instructions, we had carbonated beer in no time. We didn’t know we needed it, but now we’re all in.

Scorecard

Easy to Use?
Easy to Sanitize? X
Build Quality? X
Enjoyment? X
High Value? X

Price: $179.99
Manufacturer: Blichmann
Available from: blichmannengineering.com

Blichmann Beer Gun

Test lab notes

We once packaged more than 1,500 bottles of beer in one day after one of our Brewers Retreats, using Blichmann Beer Gun (above, right). Some beers were keg carbonated, others bottle conditioned, with a range of styles from saison to stout. With a lot of confidence, we can say that we love our beer gun. It allows us to quickly purge the bottle with CO2 for beer integrity, then fill with the beer without moving the bottle or swapping inlets.

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If you package off of a keg or enter brewing competitions, it’s a must have. Highly recommended.

Scorecard

Easy to Use? X
Easy to Sanitize? X
Build Quality? X
Enjoyment? X
High Value? X

Price: $99.99
Manufacturer: Blichmann
Available from: blichmannengineering.com

*For more gear reviews of breathalyzers, kettles, mash tuns, fermentors, coolers, growlers, and much more, check out the April/May 2017 issue of *Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine®. Get your copy today!

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