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The Cellar Decision That Changes Everything
Walk into a brewery cellar and you will see tanks. Lots of them. Some are fermenting beer. Some are carbonating it. Some are doing both. The mix of tanks in that room — fermenters, brite tanks, unitanks — determines how much beer you can make, how fast you can turn it around, and how much floor space you need.

Most equipment guides explain what each tank does and stop there. But the decision is not about which tank is "best." It is about which mix fits your batch size, your packaging format, and how often you need to cold-crash back-to-back.

The Three Tank Types
Dedicated fermenter (conical) is a cylindrical-conical tank sized for primary and secondary fermentation. It usually operates at atmospheric or low pressure (0 to 0.5 bar). Beer transfers out to a brite tank or unitank for carbonation and packaging. Yeast harvesting is straightforward, and dry-hopping is easy. Modern brewing centers on the vertical cylindrical tank with a steeply angled cone base, built with an inside cone angle of exactly sixty degrees. The sharp angle uses gravity to pull trub, cold break, and spent yeast into a dense plug at the bottom tip.

Brite tank (BBT) is a pressure-rated tank (typically 1.0 to 1.5 bar working) sized to clarify, force-carbonate, and hold finished beer at counter-pressure until it feeds the packaging line. It is not designed to ferment. Brite tanks give you the best dissolved oxygen control at packaging.

Unitank is a pressure-rated tank (typically 1.0 to 2.0 bar working) designed to ferment AND carbonate in the same vessel. It skips the transfer step between fermentation and packaging. Unitanks save floor space and capital expenditure by combining functions, but they lock up the tank for the entire fermentation plus carbonation window.

The Core Trade-Off
Unitanks cost 15 to 25 percent more than a dedicated fermenter of the same size. But they eliminate the need for a separate brite tank, which saves floor space and reduces the number of CIP cycles per barrel packaged. The question is whether the trade-off works for your production schedule.

Dedicated fermenters plus brite tanks decouple the two functions at the cost of extra tank count and floor space. This setup works best when your annual output exceeds about 1,500 barrels, when you package more than one batch per week, and when you have floor space for six or more tank positions.

Unitanks work best for nano-breweries, mobile operations, and space-constrained cellars.

What Customization Actually Delivers
Most off-the-shelf fermentation tanks come with one or two zones of cooling — typically on the jacket and cone. That works for an English ale fermented at 68°F, but it breaks down for a cold-crashed lager or a warm-fermented hazy IPA that needs a rapid chill to retain hop biotransformation compounds.

A customizable tank can include extra cooling zones on the upper shell, the cone, and even a dedicated collar jacket for the headspace. One Colorado brewery that moved to a custom fermentation tank with three independent dimpled cooling jackets saw their temperature variance drop from ±2.2°F to ±0.4°F across a 15-barrel batch.

The Headspace Question
Standard tanks often assume a fixed headspace ratio — usually 15 to 20 percent of total volume. For a neutral ale, that is fine. For a high-gravity stout or a heavily dry-hopped IPA that produces aggressive krausen, that headspace becomes a constraint. Breweries either sacrifice yield by underfilling the tank or risk blow-off losses that carry away yeast, hops, and volatile aromatics. A customizable tank allows you to oversize the headspace to 25 to 30 percent without increasing the total height beyond practical ceiling limits.

Confused about which tank mix works for your production schedule? We design cellar layouts based on your actual batch cadence — not on generic recommendations. Leave a message below with your target annual production and beer styles, and we will send you a tank configuration proposal with occupancy calculations.