Ask The Brewmasters

Howdy. We're looking for someone to help us automate our well water and RO water system to get some consistency of water chemistry in our brewing water tanks and reduce human error opportunities (running pumps dry, overfilling tanks). If you have a contact for such a thing (points for their being in a reasonable radius of ABQ, NM) I would appreciate it.

THANK YOU.

-dave

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Dave Chichura
Ex Novo Brewing
Corrales, NM
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Have you determined your criteria for blending?  Conductivity, TDS or straight Percentages?

Before yo talk to any engineering group I would determine your success criteria, otherwise you will be paying them to decide for you...

Most engineering firms that deal with the Food or Chemical industry should be able to do this.  Ive used https://www.bwdesigngroup.com

 and searching around these folks might be able to help https://www.burkert.no/no/content/download/222294/file/Water-Blending.pdf?version=6

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John Frederick
Principal Product and Process Innovator
Gallo
Modesto CA
(209) 604-5246
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At our brewery we made it very simple for ourselves.   We installed a needle valve that meters the flow of our municipal water between RO outlet and Brewing water Inlet.  We put a TDS meter inline to measure the blend we also manually check with a portable TDS meter once the tank is full before each brewing day.  We developed a spreadsheet that tells us what we need to do to fix the tanks blend if it fluctuated wildly from when it was set the evening before.  We have float switches in our RO storage tank that protects it from overflowing and the float switch will also turn off the RO unit when it is filled as well.  This was all pretty easy to install on our own without fancy over-engineered electronics.  If you have questions let me know and I can certainly field an email about this if you would like.  Hope this help a little bit

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Landon Swanson
Head Brewer
Pueblo Vida Brewing
Tucson AZ
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I'll echo the good advice of your other two respondents. Start with a water specification by identifying your critical parameters. Could be conductivity, TDS, hardness, or any number of factors.  Once you have your water "recipe" and you understand the chemistry of your well water versus RO, you can determine how to blend and/or automate blending of those streams. A good engineering firm will ask you to specify accordingly. That said, if your recipe is simple, or your parameters have broad tolerances, the blending skid need not be complicated. Ultimately this probably hinges on the quality of your well water. Best of luck!

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Jeff Muston
Technical Services Manager
Sierra Nevada Brewing Company
Mills River NC
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