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Fermenting in IBC Water Totes


firefighter75

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Lots of people start out this way--I'm one of them. At about $160/ea it can save a ton of money in the initial startup costs.

Just make sure to use brand new, sealed food grade bottles. Even though things are "food grade" you have no idea what kind of toxic chemicals may have gotten into the plastic during it's prior use.

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That's the price I found them for a few miles away. They are brand new and we can also pick up the 55 gallon barrels new for $25 each.

That's a pretty good price on the barrels.

Also, the cages are probably refurbished. Make sure to tell them you want bright cages that look like new. I've seen some with a lot of corrosion on some.

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We use cone bottom HDPE for fermenting. Work well for mash in 60 gal, and for wine in 200 gal. You won't be doing true closed fermentation, they don't seal airtight, and it is hard to do so. So, technically, it will be an open fermentation. But for larger open fermentation, we are thinking of going to Coni-pacs.

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The grain will settle in the cone as fermentation slows. Packs itself in there and your clogged. Lautering? Well then, your in business!

We do grain in. Yes, it settles. No problem, just agitate a bit before pumping. If using an impeller pump to pump over, run it backwards briefly. On the other hand, yes, if you want to pull out most of the solids, you can do that too.

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We use cone bottom HDPE for fermenting. Work well for mash in 60 gal, and for wine in 200 gal. You won't be doing true closed fermentation, they don't seal airtight, and it is hard to do so. So, technically, it will be an open fermentation. But for larger open fermentation, we are thinking of going to Coni-pacs.

Bluestar,

Have never seen those coni-pacs. Do you have any rough pricing you've seen?

Thanks!

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The grain will settle in the cone as fermentation slows. Packs itself in there and your clogged. Lautering? Well then, your in business!

That's true for any fermenter - I shudder thinking about cleaning (or even draining) an IBC tote post grain-in ferment. Grain in requires a mixer, and they're available for poly and totes too if grain-in is your thing.

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They work great for fruit juice and sugar ferments, less so for grain (although I currently have 6 going with whiskey mash... but we have a brewery do the mashing for us, and we use rice hulls to remove most of the solids before transferring into totes).

Either it's our facility or the totes, but I suspect that there is some lacto that we never quite get to killing that hang out in the porous plastic.

Cleaning isn't as bad as some folks are letting on. What I do, Is make sure that there's always an extra one on hand filled to the absolute top with your KOH/NaOH cleaning solution (making sure that you maintain the pH every time you transfer it to another tote). 24 hours of soaking is usually more than enough time for the basic cleaner to destroy any organic scale that developed during fermentation. When It's time to clean post ferment, you can simply pump the cleaning solution from the waiting tote to the one that is to be cleaned. You can then pressure wash/spray rinse the one you pumped out of, then use whatever sanitizing solution you like to get rid of whatever microorganisms you can. I usually throw in about 5 gallons of Iodine sanitizer solution and roll the thing around on all sides and let sit for 20 or so minutes. Pump to the next tote, Rinse, Repeat. Works really well in a series if you are wrangling lots of totes per batch.

This way, the chemicals and time are doing the heavy lifting and all you need is a spray hose to blast off any remaining scale on the inside of the tote. Sure beats reaching in with a nylon brush and trying to reach all those corners!

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Shop around too! Most of these tanks are carried buy multiple places and prices vary a lot .

Ain't that the truth!

Some companies wanted $230/ea for IBCs (I pay 160-170).

If you want a 110 gal fully draining cone bottom tank I used spraysmarter.com and I ordered mine with stand delivered for $310 (I'm not sure if the deal is still going), I think the plasticmart and tankmart prices were well over $100 more for the same tank.

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  • 2 weeks later...

We use 5 new IBC 275 gallon totes and 1 refurbished 330 tote. They have been working great for us. At first, cleaning them was a huge problem until we discovered the power of a shop-vac and a modified lid for a 55 gallon barrel. Now we have mastered cleaning them. takes 20-30 minutes tops. We do infusions so there's a lot of grain in the IBC. Once it's drained and dried out, we use shop vac and a modified 55 gallon barrel lid to suck out all the dried grain. We give our grain to a local farmer for his pigs and he supplies the barrels. All I do is wheel them out the door.

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