Kettle Repair at Beartown Brewery

It might look like a scene from “Predator”, but this image was what enabled us to carry out a repair on our brew kettle recently.

Repairing equipment in a brewery can often require some creative problem-solving, as the issues can be so specialised that help is not always readily available. Recently, we encountered such an issue with our 4000-litre brew kettle, where steam was leaking from the steam jacket into the gap between the inner and outer skins. Our kettle is a double-skinned vessel. It consists of:

• An inner skin containing the beer.
• Two steam jackets wrapped around the inner skin, providing heat for boiling.
• Insulation surrounding the steam jackets.
• An outer skin.

The steam leak was somewhere in the lower jacket. Since the kettle is a sealed unit, accessing the leak would require cutting a hole in the outer skin. The challenge was to find the precise location for this access point.

To locate the steam leak, I bought an infrared camera attachment for a smartphone. This little device allowed us to visualise where the outer skin heated up first when the kettle steam was switched on. A small yellow patch of heat immediately revealed itself on the outer skin, indicating the location of the steam leak. 

A local welder was then contacted to open the outer skin at that spot. The leak was exactly where the camera showed it would be, and it was easily repaired with a small weld.