The United States alcoholic beverage industry is a $200 billion+ market, and has experienced steady growth over the last ten years. Small premium brands make up one of the fastest growing segments in the industry.

Beer and malted beverages are nearly half the market, wine accounts for 15%, and distilled spirits make up the remaining 35%; however, cider and mead are making huge headway across the country.

What Kind of Equipment Is Needed for Specialty Beverages?

If you’re trying to break into the specialty spirit market or looking to expand production of a specialty alcoholic beverage, it’s likely that you already know your equipment is one of the most important investments of the operation. Faulty equipment can bring production to a screeching halt. If you don’t have the right equipment or everything isn’t set up correctly from the start, you’re going to have a host of problems down the road. Both Quality and Production will suffer.

Custom Facilities Require Custom Equipment

Repurposing an old warehouse, factory or historic urban building is a common theme among breweries, wineries, distilleries, cideries, and meaderies. All across the country, these specialty alcoholic beverage businesses are finding unique and interesting spaces that, in many ways, mirror the interesting and unique beverages these companies are bringing to market.

When it comes to the equipment used to make specialty beverages, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution in unique, refurbished buildings. Beverage making equipment has to fit the space you have available. You might want to even consider bringing in the engineers that will be fabricating your equipment before you purchase a building or sign a lease to make sure that the space can accommodate the production levels you hope to achieve.

Commercial Winemaking Equipment

Winemaking has come a long way since the first wild grapes were made into wine around 6000 B.C. While we have a great appreciation for wineries that still use traditional processes, scalability is a challenge. Many commercial wineries turn to large-scale equipment and automation to help increase production and meet demand. However, you don’t necessarily have to sacrifice quality when ramping up production. It is possible to make a good tasting wine on a mass produced scale.

While beautiful wooden barrels are often the first thing people think of when it comes to making wine, aging wine in oak barrels is simply one stage in a fairly intricate process. Large stainless steel equipment and tanks are used throughout many of the other stages in the winemaking process, like crushing, pressing, fermentation, clarification, and bottling.

Equipment for Distilling Spirits

Consumersare willing to pay more per ounce for distilled spirits than nearly any other alcoholic beverage on the market, and the equipment as well as ingredients are generally less expensive on the purchasing side.

The type of distilling equipment you will need depends largely on:

• Your budget
• Space you have available
• Type of spirits you’re distilling
• Size of each batch
• Level of overall production you hope to achieve

Stainless steel and copper are the two metals most commonly used to build distillery equipment. Both are acceptable options; however, each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Here’s a brief video from Moonshine Distiller that discusses those differences in more detail:

Stainless steel is considerably less expensive than copper; however, studies show that copper can help remove sulfites, which are generally thought to negatively impact taste and worsen hangovers. For these reasons, copper stills are more often used in small batch operations, and stainless steel stills are used in large-scale operations. Packing the distillation column with copper mesh is an old trick used in stainless steel stills to combat the sulfite problem and get the benefits of copper without the high costs.

Cider and Mead Making Equipment

Studies indicate mead is the fastest growing segment of the alcoholic beverage market. Cider is already making a huge impact across the U.S. The equipment needed to make and bottle these beverages is fairly similar to the equipment used in making beer and wine; however, there are some important differences. Though, the most important thing is that you are able to fit the equipment you need into the space you have available.

Getting Setup to Make Alcohol on a Commercial Scale

SMT has an illustrious reputation for constructing commercial brewing equipment for brewers ranging from large-scale-commercial-facilities down to the smallest micro-breweries, but we also have experience custom fabricating equipment for making wine, liquor, cider and mead. Contact us to learn more about the type of equipment you’ll need to produce alcoholic beverages on a commercial scale.