Build a Hose Cleaner: Projects
Build a Hose Cleaner
Every brewer, regardless of the size of his brewery, uses hoses to move liquid throughout the brew house. Hoses (or pipes) transport water to the kettle and wort to the counterflow chiller, fermenter and bottling bucket. If you keg your beer, one hose carries every bit of beer as it flows from keg to glass.
While homebrewers scrupulously clean kettles, chillers, fermenters, paddles, whisks, spoons, airlocks, stoppers, bottling buckets and stainless-steel kegs — what about the hoses? How do you ensure your hoses are clean and sanitary? Are you certain the hose you used last week to transport sweet wort doesn’t contain flourishing colonies of wild yeast or hideous amounts of bacteria? Are you meticulous in cleaning and sanitizing your hoses and tap lines every other week? I know of no homebrewer who does, including myself. No homebrewer, that is, until recently.
I became absorbed in this question after a very nice American wheat beer of mine took on attributes of a style I’ve never brewed — the tangy-sour Berliner Weisse. The sour flavor was the result of an infection, undoubtedly the result of some contaminant growing in the beer line during the weeks it was on tap. And you could actually see nasty deposits in the clear poly tubing. Yeeechhh. I needed a way to forever put dirty beer lines behind me, so I came up with this.
The CIP Beer Line Cleaner
This issue’s project is an inexpensive, pump-based, clean-in-place (CIP) approach to cleaning and sanitizing every hose and tube in your brew house. For less than $25 you can build a complete system for cleaning tap lines and transport tubing. With a bit of adaptation, you can even clean rigid tubing like racking canes and counter-flow wort chillers.
Maintaining clean hoses, inside and out, depends on soaking and pumping cleaning solution through them. Professional brewers traditionally rely on caustic solutions — lye or sodium hydroxide (NaOH) — and relatively high heat (160–170 °C). Caustics, however, are dangerous and require personal protection, including rubber apron, gloves and eye protection. For this reason, most homebrewers do not mess with caustics.
Fortunately for homebrewers, there are modern solutions for cleaning beer lines. These include Five Star’s PBW (Powdered Brewery Wash) a sodium percarbonate cleaner mixed with wetting agents, surfactants and chelators, which attract metallic ions. Other percarbonate-based cleaners like One-Step and B-Brite don’t contain these other chemical agents. Another chemical designed for this application is National Chemical’s BLC (Beer Line Cleaner). The remaining common cleaner is unscented household bleach. (See “Beer Minus Bacteria” by Steve Bader in December 2002 BYO for general tips on cleaning and sanitizing beer equipment.)
Sanitizers like iodophor (generic) and StarSan (Five Star) are just that — sanitizers, not cleaners. Sanitizers are meant to destroy harmful wild yeasts and bacteria, not to remove soil. Before a sanitizer can work, equipment must be thoroughly cleaned.
Your first question may be, “Why use a pump?” If you’re cleaning tap lines between a keg and spigot, you have to push stale beer out of the line and cleaning solution into it. (Think of a keg full of cleaner instead of beer.) And for open tubes, while soaking works, pumping pressure should expand the tube to expose cracks and let the cleaner penetrate. Also, soaking has no mechanical action to dislodge proteins and oxalates or quickly expose new layers of contamination to the cleaning action. Once clean, biweekly cleaning with this CIP device should keep your keg system’s lines and taps or spigots free of contamination.
Brewery tubing can also be cleaned with long tubing brushes available at many homebrew stores. These brushes work well, but — as with any manual cleaning of brewing equipment — they require the application of some elbow grease. Our CIP solution will take the drudgery out of this task.
The Project
We’ve created open tubing and tap-line cleaning “kits” based on a choice of pumps. At the conclusion are step-by-step instructions for using readily available cleaners.
Open Hose Cleaning
If you’re using a drill-powered pump — the same inexpensive Little Giant pump we used for our fermenter and keg-sized CIP system (“Fermenter Washer,” October 2002) — you’ll need two 3’ (1 m) lengths of hose with female garden hose-end connectors at one end. Cutting a washing-machine water supply hose in two is inexpensive; these hoses have two female fittings. Some homebrew shops also sell this type of hose. (You could also construct hoses from brass barbed-end fittings with female garden hose-end connectors and appropriately-sized Tygon hose.)
For those who own transfer pumps (magnetic or vane-type), you’ll want to utilize the proper intake and output connectors (likely female garden hose-end as above) or quick disconnects, which are a bit pricey but so easy.
The “business end” of either line and tubing cleaning system is the same and incredibly simple. Cut a piece of copper or stainless pipe to a length of at least 3” (75 mm) long. Insert half the length of the copper pipe into the pump’s discharge hose; it may help to heat the discharge hose in hot water (160 °F / 70 °C). Clamp the tube to the pipe, preferrably with Oetiker clamps.
To use, drop the pickup/intake end of your pump hose into a bucket of cleaner or sanitizer. Connect your dirty hose to the copper tube by inserting it 1/2” (13 mm) onto the tube and start the pump. Run cleaning solution into the line, pushing out any beer, then circulate the solution through the line for 10–30 minutes at room temperature or higher. Flush with clean water and sanitize. Sanitizing solutions require two to five minutes of contact time, depending on type. Cut your newly-cleaned hose 1/2” (13 mm) from the pipe end and discard this unclean bit.
To clean a counterflow chiller’s interior, racking canes, or keg “spears,” use a bit of tube to join the pipe to the other rigid tube. Then pump the dirt away!
Cleaning procedure is the same for open tube or an assembled keg tap or cobra head. Push the cleaning solution in, displacing any beer in the line, and let soak for 10–30 minutes. Warming the solution to 120–140 °F (40–60 °C) will speed the process. (Heat is energy and will help dissolve deposits more quickly.) Follow all manufacturer’s instructions for concentrations of cleaners or sanitizers.
Cleaning Keg Quick Disconnects
Step-by-step: Adapting our CIP cleaner for quick disconnects is a bit trickier, requiring both drilling and soldering. If you don’t keg beers, you don’t need it. Start at your local home do-it-yourself store with a keg-out fitting in hand. Select a brass compression fitting that will screw into it.
Insert your copper pipe into compression fitting as in the photo. It was necessary to drill the interior of the compression fitting to the pipe’s outside diameter (OD). Clean the pipe and solder it to the compression fitting. Use silver solder for copper or stainless steel or plumbing quality no-lead solder (copper only). Be sure to use the appropriate flux. Wash and scrub the assembly to remove any remaining flux. Attach an output hose from your pump to the copper pipe with an Oetiker clamp. It will make life easy if you make one complete pump-to-hose-to-gadget for kegs, and another for cleaning lines.
Use: To use, drop the pickup/intake end of your pump into a bucket of cleaner or sanitizer. Connect your keg cobra-head fitting to the ball-lock or pin-lock fitting and start the pump. Run cleaning solution into the line and fitting, pushing out any beer. Pump the solution for 10–30 minutes minimum at room temperature or higher. I’m using it to clean the Tap-A-Fridge project from December’s BYO; you can clean in place any dedicated tap system that uses “Corny” keg connectors! Once cleaned, flush with water, then repeat with sanitizing solution which requires only two to four minutes wet contact depending on type.
Thom attributes this project to a pub crawl from one end of Douglas, Isle of Man, to the other with his Manx cousin Peter Christie. “For great ale, it’s all about the lines, man — you have to clean them every week!” A battle cry he’s never forgotten.
