Inventing a new product isn’t easy, nor cheap! After years of touring countless wineries across the globe and getting backroom tours of their facilities, nearly a decade of making wine in my garage winery, and even writing a book on building The Homebuilt Winery, I felt the need to help folks replace all those fragile glass carboys and demijohns from their wineries and breweries with a professional grade vessel that will stand up to the rigors of commercial use and generations of garagiste winemakers alike.
Years of research went into determining just the right materials for the most versatile small format tank on the market today. Like Goldilocks sampling the bear’s porridge, we looked at lots of options: stainless steel was too expensive; blow-molded plastic was too thin; but rotomolded High Density Polyethylene was JUST RIGHT!
Now, equipped with a basic concept we set out to craft the list of functions that these new tanks would provide the fervent fermenters our customers would become. The basic elements of this list are
With my list in hand, I sought out an industrial engineering firm that could create my vision on paper and draft the blueprints for manufacturing. After a week of sketching and computer rendering, we had some interesting shapes to look at and discuss.
Next up, flushing out the final designs… Stay tuned!
Steve Hughes
Author