We need to up our output. Our beers are pretty damn good, and we're winning awards at competitions.. And we have a ton of friends that want our stuff, so what is a good setup for MORE POWER!?
Take a look at http://www.psychobrewllc.com/. I am not affiliated with them, but they have some nice setups in that range for pretty reasonable prices
If you want something nice, and I mean nice: http://www.brouwland.com/shop/product.asp?cfid=4&id=3700&cat=910&dt=24 I kept staring at it in the showroom at Brouwland for a long time Saturday. Just wishing I would win the lottery.
We have a 40 gallon setup. Bought the brew pot on ebay for $ 125.00.........., we also use a 150 qt. cooler , pump and plate chiller.....
Like others have said, scale it up - I can make 35 gallon batches with my set up. I have a 150qt cooler, a 40 gallon brewpot, kab6 burner, a couple of 12v pumps and a chillzilla. These were pieced together over years of scrounging and looking for deals. I ferment in HDPE 55 gallon drums, shortened a bit with a jigsaw. I assume you keg... ! I make small batches to tweak recipes, make new beers, if I'm short on ingredients... but it is nice to put in a similar amount of effort to get 6X the product. I enjoy brewdays but my short list of things to do usually takes precedence, making brewing a relatively rare event in my life.
Now that we think about just time and space that we have, we're probably going to move up to 30gal equipment to make 20gal batches instead of straight to 55 gal.
Stout Tanks and Kettles has great equipment that sort of bridges the gap between amateur and pro, from 5 gallon all the way up to 2-3 BBL. Glacier Tanks offers some nice pro-quality small-scale equipment, too. And they offer jacketed fermenters, which, though expensive, are pretty awesome and rare to see on systems less than 3BBL.
stouts stuff seems to be of pro quality build. lead times are super long thanks to the huge demand for his stuff. I think they just went up on their prices (who can blame them). brewhemoth makes a descently priced conical, though the cone isn't quite steep/large enough. the immersion coil works great for controlling temps. descent price, but they went up recently, too. I've been working with Carl at Bubba's Barrels to help them design stainless tri-clamp, take-apart, pressurize-able, jacketed conicals at the very large homebrewer/nanobrewer scale. He has some screaming good deals on stuff now, but I'm very excited to collect temp control data on some test batches with his prototype (1.5bbl + 3bbl) glycol chilled jacketed conicals soon. There'll be some design changes to the pic below (ie. size/positioning of optional casters, cross bracing of legs), but he's pretty close.
