Serving Tank Site Glass Hack
Build your own
I thought about writing some philosophical article about the year end and looking forward to the new year, blah, blah, blah. But let’s talk about brewing stuff instead!
As you build your brewery the smart Frankenbrew way, saving buckets of money on your project, you may come across some used serving tanks at a great price. However, you discover they are perfect except there are no site glasses! No worries. It’s not that hard to add them.
A lot of inexpensive Chinese tanks don’t have them, nor do the old Grundy tanks I love/hate so much. To add a site glass to them only requires a few extra parts.
First of all, the tank should have a tri-clamp (TC) opening at the top. This may be separate from where your spray ball is or it could be an all-in-one opening. Once you have this you will need:
2 Tees, or like mine, have a cross TC, so I only need one Tee for the bottom.
2 TC to 1/2 hose barb pieces
Length of vinyl beer hose
2 hose clamps or Oetiker clamps (preferred).
From the top add your TC to hose barb your tee or cross. At the bottom of the tank add a Tee to the outlet with a butterfly valve at the furthest end and the other hose barb on the side of the tee. Next attach your vinyl hose to the two hose barbs.
Now you need to make marks on the side of the tank every 5 or 10 gallons. If you don’t have a flow meter, you can simply add a 5 gallon bucket of water to the tank, and keep adding them, keeping track of how many. The water will show up in the site glass, so at 10 gallons, make a mark on the tank where the water level is. Continue up until you are past the curved lower section of the tank and it now goes up the straight side. Once you have a space between two lines going up the straight side, you can take a measurement of that and just make the 10 gallon marks all the way up the side until you get to the curved part at the top. From there you have a measurement at the bottom curve part, so you can add a line with the same distance at the top.
When a tank is empty and you are doing a CIP (clean in place) the cleaning and sanitizing liquid will also go through the site glass cleaning and sanitizing it as well, as long as your pump can provide enough pressure.
Having a site glass makes life much easier when planning your brews. We typically will brew another batch of the same beer when we are down to 125 gallons for ales, but 150 or more for lagers.
These can also be your Tax Determination Tanks as well as serving tanks, but you may need to show the TTB (Taxation Trade Bureau) how you measured the volumes.
Now, here’s to the new year and breweries to be built. 2023 can be a year of personal reinvention.
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Been using it for years with no problems!
My tanks have "real" sight glasses and they SUCK. The glass is super brittle, they leak CO2 and are very difficult to manually clean. I'm tempted to toss them all and use your method Tom!