CO2 collects where people work. Ethanol vapour does something worse.
A brewery or distillery falls under DSEAR for the ethanol vapour around stills, spirit stores and bottling, which usually needs hazardous area zoning. The carbon dioxide from fermentation, cellars and cylinder stores is not flammable and sits outside DSEAR, but it displaces oxygen and sinks, so it is the second hazard the same site has to control.
Not flammable, but it displaces oxygen and it sinks. Fermentation rooms, cellars, tank pits and CO2 cylinder stores are where people are overcome, and it happens without warning.
Any below-ground room on a brewery site is a CO2 trap. Access control and monitoring matter more than ventilation calculations here.
Ethanol vapour at working temperature. This is usually a genuine zoned area, with equipment category consequences.
Open transfers are the release sources that set the zone extents. How you fill is more important than what you store.
Casks at cask strength in a warehouse. Still a flammable liquid store, whatever it is called.
Caustic and acid cleaning regimes sit alongside all of the above and belong in the same assessment even though they are a different kind of harm.
West Wales has a growing number of small breweries, cider producers and gin and whisky distilleries, often in converted farm buildings.
Converted buildings are the recurring theme: a process designed around ventilation put into a stone building with none, or a still installed in a space with a suspended ceiling and no thought about where vapour goes. None of that is unfixable, but it needs writing down before an inspector or an insurer asks.
Breweries generate carbon dioxide in quantity, which is an asphyxiant rather than a flammable, and many also handle caustic cleaning chemicals. Where there is a spirit still, ethanol vapour makes it firmly a DSEAR site, and the still usually needs zoned areas around it. Size does not change the duty.
Carbon dioxide is not flammable, but it is a dangerous substance in the sense that matters: it displaces oxygen and it collects in low points such as cellars, pits and tank rooms. Fermentation rooms, cellars and CO2 cylinder stores need assessing and, in most cases, monitoring.
Around the still, the spirit safe, the receiver and any filling or cask-filling point, plus the spirit store. Extents depend on the volumes, the ventilation and how the transfers are done, which is why it needs looking at rather than copying from another distillery.
A room full of casks at cask strength is a flammable liquid store, and the fact that it is a warehouse rather than a chemical store does not change that. Ventilation, ignition sources and separation all apply.
The taproom is a fire risk assessment question rather than DSEAR, unless cylinders or spirit are stored there. In practice most brewery sites need both documents and they should be written to agree with each other.
Spirit stores are flammable liquid stores.
Zoning around a still and its transfers.
Who else needs a DSEAR assessment and why.
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