Hey, Rick Uzubell again from Cabaret Design Group,
talking today about long-draw draft beer system design.
Now that we know a little bit more about
how glycol systems operate, the true
advantage of them is that they offer
a fool-proof method of delivering
beer at a temperature from the walk-in
cooler and environmentally controlling it
all the way. What's nice about the glycol
systems is that they're good up to 750
feet, some of them. Micro-matic will go up to 750
feet, and their trunk lines can be anywhere
from four products to 20 products.
Perlick, for instance, will go up to to 24 products.
So, as you get up into the higher density
lines, there's more engineering that goes
into it and more considerations for how
it's installed, exactly, which tend to
be a little different than the typical
run-of-the-mill eight-product line sets here.
But, suffice it to say, that, if you have a
properly-sized power pack, you could run
as many as three trunk lines, to three
different locations, each up to 750 feet
in length. The beauty of this system is
that, well, economy of scale for one, you
have one investment in the power pack, you
have all sorts of capacity, you can, in
theory, push up to 60 products out of this
power-pack, for instance; and the other
thing that's nice about it is, is that
with the length of the system that we're
talking about in terms of capacity -- 750
feet for instance, now you can actually
have options for where you place your
walk-in cooler, so if you have this type
of the system,
you now could take your walk-in
cooler and place it outside the building
for instance, or in another part of your
building which is less impactful on your
operation. So, now you can turn this into
more productive space, which is
revenue-producing. So you have all kinds
of advantages in a glycol system.
Another advantage of the glycol systems
is the tremendous amount of tower designs
that are available. Everywhere you go
nowadays, you see all these
tremendously fancy towers that people
are enchanted by and I'm showing a few
of them right here, and these are just a
few examples of what's available in
the market, but the sky is the limit, just about.
And, for instance, even Micro-Matic, they
have a specials department which will
custom design a tower that can meet your
needs. So, you have all the flexibility of
expanding the system, you have the
fashion sort of aspect of design of the
towers themselves and you have
the flexibility of placing the equipment
and in many places. These are advantages
you don't have with any other system. Of
course, they are a little more expensive.
For instance, a 16-product line system,
like I'm showing here in this front bar,
two towers of eight products each, well
the cost of this system would be
about $1,000 per product line,
so for 16 products, you're probably talking,
with installation, somewhere in the
neighborhood of $16,000 - $20,000, which
really isn't bad.
There's some ongoing maintenance,
that's true, but you have a fairly
reliable system in-place here; it's
environmentally controlled, and by the
way, one other thing I'll mention about
walk-in coolers: if you're really going
to manage a really good draft beer
system, especially if it's a glycol
system, you want to keep the integrity of
beer at the highest possible priority. So,
therefore, really what you should do is
dedicate a walk-in cooler exclusively
for your draft beer so that you don't
make the mistake of putting
your case beer in there and having
people go in and out of this walk-in
cooler all day or all night long,
whereby maintaining the ideal
temperature within the cooler becomes sort
of a pipe dream, because you really need
to keep this cooler in the 36 -
38 degree Fahrenheit range, or it just
simply isn't going to perform, and then
your glycol system really is suffering
for it and your investment really is
sort of wasted. So, keep a high priority
on placing your draft beer in a designated
walk-in cooler and have another walk-in
cooler for your bottle beer and another
one also for your food. So, in any size of
an operation you'll see multiple walk-in
coolers, for that reason. So, basically
that's it -- you have a really good system
that has great capacity, great engineering,
and great reliability, in terms of delivering
the product at the right temperature --
everything you need when you look at a
glycol system.