Cleaning and Sanitizing for Homebrewing

I like to break things down into simple elements to help myself understand complex processes or concepts.  Breaking things down makes it easier to teach others, too.  The process to making great homebrew, which argubly can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be, can be broken down into three elements:

• Keeping things clean
• Executing sound brewing techniques
• Controlling fermentation

The second elements is the one where the most fun can be had.  To me, brewing techniques includes many things such as recipe formulation, putting great equipment to use, creating a great bottling process, etc.

Controlling fermentation is less fun, but it’s still interesting trying to figure out how to keep your fermentation vessel at the right temperature so the yeast can do their thing.

I’ll write about these two elements later.  Today’s focus is on keeping things clean.  Cleaning and sanitizing your equipment for homebrewing is probably the most overlooked element of the three elements.  I don’t particularly get a kick out of it…but I understand that it plays a big part in making a good tasting beer.

I made a mistake once and I didn’t clean my bottles as well as I could have.   The brown ale I made tasted awful.  The beers that weren’t contaminated with whatever bacteria I didn’t properly get out of the bottle had a soapy aftertaste because I cleaned my bottles with dish soap and didn’t rinse them well.  Carelessness ruined a good brew.

I will never let that happen again…and hopefully I can make sure it doesn’t happen to you either.

Cleaning

When it comes to cleaning, I guess you could use regular old dish soap. The issue is in the rinsing. You have to rinse it well for it to be effective, and I had an issue with that. I didn’t rinse long enough.

I would suggest using a specialized cleaning solution. Powdered Brewery Wash or PBW is what I have used since that bad brew and I haven’t had any problem with it. You can use it without scrubbing but a little elbow grease here and there helps out.

Another cleaning solution that I haven’t used is Beer Line Cleaner or BLC but it’s specialized for brewing. If you have used this cleaning solution, share your experience by leaving a comment.

Sanitizing

After cleaning your equipment (basically anything that will come into contact with your beer), you will need to sanitize it. Sanitizing is the process of killing microorganisms on your brewing equipment (up to 99.9% of those in existance which is different than sterilization which is the process of killing 100% of them).

Mike swears by Star San. It’s an acid based sanitizer than needs no rinsing. One that I have used in the past is Iodophor and I have been happy with the results. If you follow the instructions on the package on how to use it, you should find success. Mike and I usually let things sit in sanitizer overnight, just to be extra sure. It’s probably overkill, but it works for us.