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Refrigeration & Cooling Demand: Wort to Cellar

Wort chilling, fermentation temperature control and cold conditioning — the brewery's other dominant load, this time electrical.

10 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead


If the wort boil sets the gas bill, fermentation and conditioning set the electricity bill. Both are refrigeration loads — cooling jackets on vessels, run by a glycol (or ammonia) chiller plant — but they have very different shapes, and it's easy to guess wrong about which one actually costs more over a year. This lesson uses the refrigeration COP concept from the systems courses to find out.