I have 6 3BBL serving tanks and 2 5BBL jacketed fermenters from the GW Kent micro line. None of it is in use for production yet but I have water tested all of it. The serving tanks were pretty much perfect when they arrived. A few of the welds were a little rough and there were some fairly insignificant surface scratches inside the tanks. The fermenters were more of the same, except for one of them which had some sort of a weld burn-through on the bottom of the cone. This causes a small, but significant leak from the jacket. GW Kent has offered to pay for a local welder to repair the hole, but of course finding a qualified stainless welder in my area who won't end up making the problem a hell of a lot worse is a challenge.
The 3/4" MPT threads on the jacket for attaching glycol in/out are atrocious too. A couple of them look like they tapped them more than once. They all had bits of metal and pipe dope (I assume from the back-gassing process during manufacture) in them. And they were a challenge to get fittings to mate into, in the end, lots of teflon, elbow grease, and finger crossing made them water tight.
BUT as mentioned, often times, you can't beat GW Kent's lead time. I had the serving tanks within 4 weeks of ordering them and I had the fermenters within a week of ordering them. They are often sitting on tanks/fermenters/whatever up there in Michigan, sometimes from other breweries' who end up not being able to purchase the items, sometimes just timing I guess.
Topic: getting 30 bbls on line (Read 10555 times)
