Title 24 Requirements for Wineries and Breweries
In a winery or brewery the cellar setpoint decides the rules. A space held at 55°F or below is refrigerated storage, which becomes a covered process at 3,000 square feet, and the chilled lines feeding the tanks are process piping with insulation requirements of their own.
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55°F is the line
A refrigerated warehouse is a space of 3,000 square feet or more, built for storing or handling products, where mechanical refrigeration holds the temperature at 55°F or below. Section 120.6(a) applies at that size, and it also catches smaller refrigerated rooms whose areas add up to 3,000 square feet when one refrigeration system serves them. Below that, refrigerated rooms meet the Title 20 walk-in cooler regulations instead.
A barrel room held a few degrees above 55°F is none of those things. With cooling above 5 Btu/hr per square foot it is directly conditioned space, and the ordinary envelope and mechanical requirements apply to it instead.
Insulating a refrigerated cellar
Once Section 120.6(a) applies, a cooler's roof or ceiling and its walls must be insulated to at least R-28 — well beyond anything the ordinary envelope asks for. The evaporators come under the same section, which requires small single-phase fan motors in new evaporators to be electronically commutated or reach 70 per cent efficiency.
Tank cooling is process piping
Section 120.3 requires insulation on piping that cools a process — refrigerant suction, chilled water and brine distribution unrelated to space conditioning — and on process heating piping carrying steam, condensate or hot water, to the thicknesses in its tables. A chilled glycol loop serving fermentation tank jackets is that kind of system. Insulation exposed to weather needs a cover suited to outdoor service, never adhesive tape, and cold lines outside conditioned space need a Class I or II vapour retarder with every joint sealed.
Process heating and cooling piping is on the code's own list of covered processes, so it is documented with the process systems rather than the mechanical set.
Steam, compressed air and the agricultural question
A boiler of 300,000 Btu/hr or more serving a process is a process boiler, with combustion air and oxygen-trim requirements that start at larger capacities. Compressed air systems of 25 horsepower or more come into scope too. And the definition of an agricultural building excludes any place of employment where agricultural products are processed, treated or packaged, or a place used by the public — so neither the production building nor the tasting room is an agricultural building.
Where to go deeper
The full cold-storage requirements — floors, underslab heating, evaporators — are on the refrigerated warehouse page. A brewery raising steam should read the process boiler requirements before the boiler is selected.