Article

Cleaning Action: An ounce (28 g) of prevention

cleaning and sanitizing beer bottles with a solution and a brush
Photo courtesy of Charles A. Parker/Images Plus

When people find out that you’re a beer lover/obsessive – you inevitably get the question — “What’s your favorite beer?” From the plethora of pithy answers, we usually respond — “the one in front of me!” Some questions just don’t have serious answers. 

But when you get known as a “brewer,” then the curious will inevitably inquire (after the rounds of, “is that legal?” and, “What do you make?”) — “What’s the most important thing when making beer?” 

For us, there is no wittiness that can encompass the deadly seriousness of this matter — and there’s truly only one answer: Cleaning and sanitation. Swimming through the swirling morass of brewing bugaboos, it would be easy to get lost. Style, ingredients, process, mash temperatures, water chemistry, fermentation temperatures, yeast vitality — these are all essential elements of a great beer, but the utterly mundane and boring step of cleaning and sanitation towers above all the “fun” pieces of brewing. 

Put simply: If you don’t execute your cleaning and sanitation; nothing else matters. Not your process controls, your super charged yeast, your finest malts and hops . . . nothing. 

What do we need to achieve to win the brewing sanitation game? We need to eliminate shelters for beer spoilage organisms (a.k.a., cleaning) and then we need to “eliminate” the organisms themselves sufficiently to give our favored critters — brewer’s yeast — time to establish and dominate the worty landscape (a.k.a., sanitation). This issue, we’ll start with cleaning as it is the bedrock on which we build our good habits.

Cleaning

Brewing generates a fair amount of mess and sludge. Proteins glom onto the kettle walls, yeast settles everywhere, beerstone latches onto every surface available. We have to get rid of it because every little bit provides a potential hiding hole for some nasty critters just waiting to spoil your beer.  

A word about where to put your effort — we tend to think of brewing “hot-side” and “cold-side” operations. The typical rule of thumb teaches us that while cleanliness is lovely on the hot side, it’s imperative on the cold side. In other words, up until the point you’re done boiling the wort, a little sloppiness is OK. But the second the wort is chilled — your A-game is required. Practically, this means anything touching cold wort needs to be clean and sanitary — starting with any kettle valve or tubing that you use to transfer from the boil pot to the fermenter all the way to the bottle or tap line you pour the beer with. To our minds, it just makes sense to keep it all nice and spiffy. OK, reasonably spiffy
. . . don’t go overboard about it.

Cleaning Chemicals

In the professional brewing world, the choice of cleaning compounds tends to rotate around various preparations of caustic soda. Lye and other professional cleaning chemicals are powerful and aggressive dissolvers of most beer soil. But they are dangerous — caustic burns are no joke. 

In a work environment compounds that require care, experience, and protective equipment make perfect sense. For the casual hobbyist, we cannot stress enough — don’t do it. Our needs allow us to build in a margin for safer cleaners that are less likely to cause issues. 

Put simply: If you don’t execute your cleaning and sanitation; nothing else matters.

We’re both fans of the Alkaline Brewery Wash from Craft Meister. It’s safer than straight caustic soda, but has more power than most brewery cleaners. The other major type of homebrew cleaners are sodium percarbonate-based solutions like Five Star Chemicals’ PBW or Craft Meister Oxygen Brewery Wash. Homebrewers, being notoriously thrifty, have made a number of “clone” cleaners using mixtures of TSP (trisodium phosphate) and OxiClean, etc. But, in general, we recommend sticking with a professionally made product for surety and consistency . . . and this applies to all brewing solutions. 

If you must use something like OxiClean, then make sure you buy the version that is free of additional scents. (e.g., OxiClean Free) And don’t use regular dish soap! Not just because of the smell, but the soap isn’t as efficient at cleaning and, unlike OxiClean, requires a ton of rinsing to ensure your brew gear is free of residue.

The Magical Cleaning Trio

Cleaning is, at heart, a chemical and physical action. Cleaning solutions attack the various bonds in brewing residues to remove them from the surface and we flush them away. Thinking back to your basic chemistry classes — the rate of chemical reactions are impacted by time, temperature, concentration, and agitation. The longer you let something soak, the more bonds get attacked. The higher the temperature, the faster the bonds get attacked. More cleaning compound, more agents to attack the grime. And with agitation and physical scrubbing, the bonds get broken more easily.

As always, there are caveats. Don’t let a cleaner soak for too long less it also attacks your vessel surface. (See the number of hoses Drew’s had to replace because cleaner attacked the vinyl.) Many cleaners work better at higher temperatures but may also break down if heated to boiling (or melt your plastics/shatter your glass). Too much cleaning compound is wasteful (it doesn’t dissolve) or potentially messy like extra OxiClean “gluing” itself to your carboy surface. And if you scrub too hard, you can scratch your vessel surfaces — even stainless steel will fall victim to enough physical enthusiasm!

Mix the proper amount of chemical into hot water (120–140 °F/50–60 °C, for instance). Give it 10–20 minutes to soak in and then scrub with a stiff bristled plastic brush or plastic scrubby. Nothing beats a little elbow grease in these matters and wearing brewing gloves are definitely recommended. Word of caution — when dealing with plastic, like buckets, don’t scrub so hard that you create scratches. If piles of gunk provide shelter to bacteria, scratches are impregnable safehouses for beer spoilers. Scrape a bucket and you’ll need to scrap it.

Denny cleans with a sponge after soaking.  After a good soak, there’s almost never a need for heavy scrubbing and using a sponge ensures that you won’t scratch anything. And if you do need something “extra,” mechanically speaking, Drew swears by plastic scrapers made, nominally, for cast iron cookware. The plastic is rigid enough to give you some force without being strong enough to mar glass and steel surfaces. 

After all the gunk is detached from the vessel, hose, gadget, or widget, you need to rinse and rinse well. You want the surfaces to be free of all chemical residue. If you run your fingers along the surface and feel them getting slippery, you need to rinse some more. The rule of thumb Drew follows is to rinse with as much water as you used cleaner. 

This is particularly important with acid-based sanitizers to avoid throwing off the pH of the sanitizing solution. Plus, who wants cleaner in their beer?

Water Marks and Beer Stone

Not every piece of brewing residue should be attacked with an alkaline cleaning agent. You’ll be fighting chemistry if you do and busting out the extra tanks of elbow grease to scrub them away.

The two classic examples that occur often are water mineral deposits and beer stone. After a boil you’ll often be left with a whitish residue of various mineral salts that have fallen out of solution (calcium carbonate, for example) and at the same time in your boil kettle or kegs, you might notice a buildup of brown patches that don’t respond to scrubbing — that’s beer stone (calcium oxalate, amongst other things).

Both of these are better attacked via an acidic solution. Even a simple bath of citric acid in hot water, or a long soak with an acid-based sanitizer like Saniclean, will allow you to simply wipe away the buildup with a sponge. 

Acid Rinses/Passivation

Because of things like beer stone and residual caustic solutions, an acid rinse is almost always used in the professional brewing world. It’s also important in a stainless steel, quick turnaround world due to its passivation action. Passivation is a chemical process meant to remove from the steel any free iron and restore a protective oxide layer that prevents rusting and interaction between the metal and acidic wort. 

The oxide coating will occur naturally over time, but a quick rinse of a hot citric acid solution can speed up the process of protecting the metal. The general consensus is that in the homebrewing world passivation is rarely needed. The only time Denny passivated anything was when he had the top of a (legally obtained) keg cut out and the opening began to rust.  A quick scrub with Barkeeper’s Friend (BKF) took care of passivating the stainless steel due the oxalic acid in BKF. Unless you’re brewing frequently with little downtime, you’ll be fine!

A Word About Small Parts

In the midst of all this cleaning, scrubbing, and soaking talk — our primary focus has been on the big things: The fermenter surface, the keg interior, etc. If you skip over the small parts, you might as well have not done anything at all. Take the extra time to break those valves and gaskets down and make sure they’re clean. You’d be surprised at the stuff that can grow in a kettle ball valve or hide behind an o-ring on a keg post.

An Ounce (28 g) of Prevention

Cleaning doesn’t have to be hard — in fact, if you’re smart about your cleaning regimen, you should be starting as early as possible. The biggest sin you can commit is waiting to clean. Time allows residues to dry and harden, stains to penetrate surfaces, etc. In other words, rinse the big stuff out the second you can. 

Beer bottles, for instance, are notorious for stubborn baked in yeast residue that is difficult to remove and scrub. After pouring a beer, take 10–15 seconds and rinse the bottle out. Advantage is you’ll give your beer a chance to fully form a head and settle. Five minutes now will keep you from 30 minutes of work later. (That should be tattooed on Drew’s eyelids as a reminder.) 

Issue: December 2022