What is beer brewing equipment?

A brewhouse is a building made for brewing beer and ale. This could be a part of a specialized brewery operation, but historically a brewhouse is a private building only meant for domestic production.

Larger households, such as noble estates, often had dedicated brewhouses that could be quite elaborate using equipment not too different from that of commercial breweries. English country houses have detailed records of brewhouses.

In ordinary farming households brewing was in some regions done outside, particularly in summer. The Baltic countries have a concept of a "summer kitchen", which is basically an outdoor area used for cooking and brewing in summer, but brewing could also be done outside in parts of Norway and Sweden as well as Russia.

source: zybrew.beer

The most modern breweries still use cylindroconical tanks. The next step in process development could be the introduction of continuous fermentation with immobilized yeast. The most recent developments in the technology of these tanks involve what one could call “the accessories” of the tanks in the sense of mechanical mixing (recirculation by pumping from the bottom to the top) of the fermenting beer, as well as advanced control systems that automatically measure and control the progress of the fermentation. See continuous fermentation and immobilized yeast reactor.

Traditions Maintained

Not all of the traditional tank types have vanished with the introduction of the cylindroconical tank. The requirements of the process involved in brewing traditional English ales have made many large breweries stick to the traditional geometry of square tanks with a “penetrable ceiling,” through which the traditional top-fermenting yeasts will accumulate at the end of primary fermentation and from where the yeast can be automatically harvested by a combination of valves and jets. This type of tank is called “Yorkshire Square,” referring to its shape and the place where they were invented and became widespread during the 20th century. Modern Yorkshire squares can be as large in volume as cylindroconicals and are also closed and fitted with CIP facilities, thus making them just as easy to automate as cylindroconicals. But because they are more complex, they are also expensive in terms of investment, they take up more space, and they cannot normally be placed outdoors.