C-DRONE GUIDE · 26 AUGUST 2026
Drone and Industrial Brewery or Malthouse: ICPE Heading 2220, Fermentation Tanks, Malt Silos and Prices
A row of twelve-metre stainless steel tanks lined up along a façade, a malt silo and its handling tower looming over the grain intake yard, a brewhouse roof taking a constant beating from wort kettle steam, and a refrigeration machine room whose air coolers nobody climbs up to check before they fail : an industrial brewery or a malthouse packs tall, hot, dusty and hard-to-reach structures into a few thousand square metres. Most of what a maintenance department needs to see — corrosion at tank feet and on anchor blocks, malt dust deposits at height, insulation defects on the steam network, silting in the pre-treatment ponds — reads well from the air and poorly from the ground. Here is what the drone documents on this kind of site, what it does not replace, and the prices.
Published on 26 August 2026, reviewed on 29 August 2026 — regulations in force as of August 2026.
Brewery, malthouse: which ICPE headings since heading 2253 was repealed?
The way a brewery is classified changed logic in 2018. Heading 2253, which explicitly covered the preparation and packaging of beverages — beer, fruit juices, other drinks —, was repealed on 25 October 2018 by decree n° 2018-900 of 22 October 2018. The same text added fermentation to the wording of heading 2220, which now covers the "preparation or conservation of plant-based food products by cooking, heat sterilisation, freezing, freeze-drying, dehydration, roasting, fermentation, etc.". This is therefore the heading under which an industrial brewery is now generally classified. The regime is set by the quantity of incoming products : above 10 tonnes a day the plant falls under registration (order of 14 December 2013), between 2 and 10 tonnes a day under declaration with periodic inspection (order of 17 June 2005), with the thresholds raised to 20 tonnes a day for a plant running no more than 90 consecutive days a year. Very large sites move to authorisation under the IED directive, through heading 3642, above 300 tonnes of finished product a day from exclusively plant-based raw materials — 600 tonnes for seasonal plants running 90 consecutive days at most.
Malthouses went through a comparable shift : the former heading 2225, titled "sugar factories, sugar refineries, malthouses", was repealed on 24 November 2017 by decree n° 2017-1595. Steeping, germination and kilning of barley have since been assessed against the generic agri-food headings and, for large capacities, the IED threshold ; the site's prefectoral order is the only authoritative document. Around that main heading, several secondary classifications almost always stack up, each governing structures that are visible from outside : heading 2160 for silos and bulk grain storage releasing flammable dust, heading 2260 for grain cleaning, screening and milling, heading 2910 for the boiler house producing brewing steam, heading 2921 for evaporative cooling towers and the legionella risk, heading 4735 as soon as the refrigeration plant uses more than 150 kg of ammonia as refrigerant, and heading 2781 if the site digests its own effluent. Storage of carbon dioxide recovered from fermentation has no dedicated heading at brewery scale : the asphyxiation risk it carries is handled through risk assessment and pressure equipment regulations, not through the nomenclature.
Malt silos and grain handling tower: dust and impossible access
The upstream end of a brewery or a malthouse looks a lot like a flour mill : intake pit, bucket elevators, handling tower, a bank of vertical silos, cyclones and dust-extraction ducting. These structures commonly rise twenty to forty metres, stand shoulder to shoulder, and offer neither ground clearance nor a footing for a lift. A photogrammetric flight produces, in an hour, an orthophoto and a 3D model of the whole, in which the expensive-when-found-late details read directly : a weeping weld at the top of a silo shell, corrosion at the cladding-to-roof junction, a loose sheet on the tower, a blocked gutter above an electrical panel, or an explosion relief vent whose discharge path is obstructed by a lean-to added later. The method is exactly the one described in our guides to inspecting a flour mill and inspecting an industrial chimney or silo, and it draws on our surveying and photogrammetry services.
Malt dust is not just any dust. A study by M. Nifuku and H. Enomoto, published in 2001 in the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, measured the static electrification of malt grain dust during pneumatic conveying and concluded that malt, precisely because it has been dried and kilned, charges more than other grains and warrants particular electrostatic vigilance in silos (see the study on Google Scholar). A visible malt dust deposit on a flat roof, a cornice or the outside of a duct is therefore never a cosmetic detail : it is the fuel for a secondary explosion. The overflight produces a dated, point-by-point image that helps prioritise the cleaning schedule ; it obviously replaces neither that schedule, nor the explosion protection document, nor the ATEX zoning drawn up by the operator. At the foot of the silos, the intake yard — waiting trailers, bulk-delivered barley piles, bulk bags of spent grain awaiting collection — is measured by the same method detailed in our guide to drone stockpile volume measurement.
Outdoor stainless tanks: shell, insulation and anchor corrosion
Cylindro-conical fermentation vessels and conditioning tanks installed outdoors have become the visual signature of industrial breweries : ten to fifteen metres tall, a stainless shell or an insulated envelope clad in aluminium, a glycol cooling jacket, walkways and ladders at the top. From the ground they look indestructible. From the air they tell a different story : an open cladding joint letting water into the insulation, a ferric contamination rust stain on a stainless wall, condensate running down the same spot day after day, a deformed top handrail, and above all the anchor blocks at the tank feet. That is where the bad surprises gather : concrete spalling around a fixing, anchor rod corrosion sustained by loaded wash water and permanent damp at the base, a lifted base plate. A photogrammetric coverage plus close manual-flight shots produce a per-tank report, with location tags, that feeds straight into the maintenance plan and into the call between a spot repair and a full refurbishment.
This reading excuses no statutory inspection. Checking a vessel's mechanical integrity, in-service monitoring of pressure equipment where applicable, and expert assessment of a suspect crack are matters for an engineering consultancy or an approved body : the drone hands them a dated, exhaustive external survey, it concludes nothing. The flight protocol itself draws on published work. A study by Javier Gómez and Alberto Tascón, published in 2021 in the journal Informes de la Construcción, developed and validated a drone inspection protocol for a tall agro-industrial building, structured into successive flight plans tailored to each façade and to the roof (see the study on Google Scholar). Transposed to a tank farm, that means one flight plan per row and a dedicated pass over the tank tops. On choosing the means, our comparison of drone versus rope access sums up the rule : the drone sees fast and everywhere, the rope technician touches, measures and repairs — the two complement each other more than they compete, and the first is often used to target the second.
Brewhouse roof, steam network and refrigeration machine room
The brewhouse is a hot, humid workshop : mashing, lautering, wort boiling, constant vapour vented through steam stacks that pierce the roof. The roof therefore takes a harsh hygrometric beating, with accelerated corrosion around duct penetrations, standing water behind waterproofing upstands, and premature ageing of roof lights. On sites that still have an older roof, asbestos adds a further question that rules out any unprepared access. A drone roof inspection flight covers in a single sortie what one person would spend half a day walking with harness and lifeline, without sending anyone up. The layout is close to the one described in our guide to inspecting an industrial dairy plant, where a humid roof and a refrigeration plant coexist in the same way.
Drone thermography has two clear uses here. On the steam network linking the boiler house to the kettles — overhead runs, headers, steam traps, roof penetrations — it spots the stretches where lagging has gone, has soaked up water or was poorly refitted after a repair : every metre of bare pipe is a permanent energy loss, and the temperature difference reads unambiguously on a radiometric image. It is a deliverable that usefully feeds an energy audit, particularly when an energy savings certificates file is being prepared. On the refrigeration machine room and its rooftop air coolers, the thermal pass highlights abnormal icing, a stopped fan in a bank, a compressor running hotter than its neighbours — all visible symptoms for the refrigeration contractor to check. Two limits must be stated plainly : the camera detects no gas leak, neither ammonia nor CO2, and it removes none of the obligations attached to evaporative cooling towers, whose legionella monitoring rests on water analyses and a logbook, not on an image.
Brewery effluent, corporate imagery, method and prices
A brewery uses and discharges a lot of water, and its effluent is heavily loaded : tank wash water, fermenter bottoms, racking rinse water, with a high organic load and an often low pH. Most sites therefore run a pre-treatment plant — screening, neutralisation, buffer tank, sometimes flotation — and a growing number recover that load as biogas. A systematic review by Mariana Pires Maria and co-authors, published in 2023 in the journal Environmental Advances, surveys anaerobic digestion of brewery wastewater and confirms the value of that route for treating heavily loaded water while producing energy (see the study on Google Scholar). On these structures the drone does the same job as at a wastewater treatment plant or a biogas plant : a photogrammetric survey of the basins to show silting and the actually available useful volume, a visual check of the liner and banks, the condition of a digester cover and its anchors — with no operator walking the water's edge.
Once the aircraft is on site, the same sortie feeds a second, secondary but real purpose : corporate communication. A brewery is a photogenic industrial object — a row of tanks, the intake yard, a silo branded in the company's colours — and a few clean aerial shots serve a press pack as well as a "our sites" page, a virtual tour aimed at customers and distributors, or a recruitment campaign. Two caveats up front : filming must be framed like everything else (no shot revealing a security device, prior management sign-off on the areas filmed) and the image rights of identifiable employees are settled beforehand, not afterwards, as our guide to drone video for employer branding sets out. Bundling this with a technical mission remains, for the same budget, the best way to get it without a second visit.
The technical mission runs half a day to a full day depending on the number of structures. It starts with a briefing with the maintenance or QHSE manager : the list of tanks and basins to cover, ATEX-classified areas around the silos and grain handling, production phases during which the flight stays at a distance, truck traffic at the intake yard and the despatch dock, a take-off point clear of traffic lanes. As with any mission on an industrial site, the prevention plan and coactivity are settled before the flight, never on the day. Always check the zone on Géoportail before any quote — many breweries and malthouses occupy an urban brownfield or a historic town-centre site, which can call for the organisation described in our guide to flying a drone in French cities — and require the contractor to hold up-to-date professional liability insurance.
2026 prices (excl. VAT) : €400 to €800 for a one-off volume measurement of the barley or spent-grain stock at the intake yard ; €350 to €700 for a targeted inspection — one bank of outdoor tanks, a handling tower or the brewhouse roof alone ; €1,000 to €1,800 for a full campaign combining a site orthophoto and 3D model, a per-tank report, a thermal pass on the steam network and the refrigeration plant, and a survey of the pre-treatment basins ; €250 to €500 per visit for recurring monitoring on the same flight plan ; allow €300 to €600 more for a corporate imagery package bundled with the technical mission. A travel charge applies beyond a 30 to 50 km radius. Request a quote stating the number and height of the outdoor tanks, the roof area and the goal (maintenance plan, regulatory file, energy audit or communication).
Frequently asked questions
Can the drone inspect the inside of a fermentation tank?
Not in the framework described here. A fermentation or conditioning tank is a confined space that can hold carbon dioxide at lethal concentrations, and entering it falls under a confined-space work procedure with atmosphere testing, ventilation and outside supervision. Internal inspection of such a vessel, like the in-service monitoring of pressure equipment where applicable, remains the business of an approved body and of the operator. The drone described in this guide flies outdoors : it documents the shell, the cladding, the insulation, the nozzles, the walkways and the anchors, not the inside of the vessels.
Does the thermal camera detect a CO2 or ammonia leak?
No, and this is a common confusion. A standard thermal camera reads a surface temperature : it spots abnormal icing on a refrigeration line, a hot spot on a compressor, a length of steam pipe whose lagging has gone. It measures no gas concentration in the air at all. Detecting a carbon dioxide leak in the fermentation hall or an ammonia leak in the machine room is exclusively the job of the fixed detectors and alarms required by the site's risk assessment and by the regulations covering the refrigeration plant.
Does drone volume measurement of a barley or malt stockpile replace weighing?
No. The quantity of incoming or outgoing material that underpins the ICPE regime, a supplier invoice or a tax declaration is measured on the weighbridge, a regulated metrology device. A photogrammetric survey of a barley pile at the intake yard or of a spent-grain stock awaiting collection produces a volumetric estimate accurate to within a few percent on a well-formed pile, very useful for running a campaign, settling a stock-rotation dispute or documenting an insurance declaration — but it carries no contractual value and never substitutes for weighing.