Cleaning and Sanitizing a Brewery

As I mentioned in a post on Facebook, cleaning seemed to me to be self-explanatory and a “non-topic”.  Anyone who has ever made their way around a kitchen, or as I have, worked in a retail food establishment, should know how to clean food preparation equipment.  A simple detergent that is biodegradable (because most of it gets dumped on the ground when you’re done) and a Scotch-Brite pad.  Use warm water and scrub away the gunk, right? 

As it turn out, no.  It’s not that simple.  Brewery soil is a different concoction of organics with a low pH (meaning mildly acidic).  Think about all the different sugar compounds created, maltose, dextrose, sucrose, etc. and then boiling that with hops which are for all intents green flowers.  The mess that gets created gets into everything.  If you don’t clean at all, you’ll end up with a mold experiment so it’s easy to realize that stuff needs to be washed off.  I’ve read many suggestions like using hot Oxiclean or other kitchen type cleanser to let everything soak, and then come back and scrub it.  I have always had on hand a container of Powder Brewery Wash (PBW) from Five Star, but compared to something like Oxiclean, PBW is expensive so I only used it when stuff wasn’t coming clean with other products.  I used this method for the first ten years of my brewing hobby.

“Why cleaning matters” is a page on the Five Star Chemical page for home brewers and for me I understood that you cannot sanitize something that isn’t clean.  Dirt harbors bacteria so if the dirt isn’t removed, a surface cannot be sanitized.  I think we all know what “clean” means, but what does “sanitized” mean?  We’ve all heard words like “disinfect”, “sterilize” and “sanitize” but what do they really mean?  These three words form a progression of remaining bacterial infection.  Something that has been sterilized has had all micro-organisms –harmful or not, and their spores killed on a surface.  Something that has been disinfected has had all harmful micro-organisms and their spores killed on a surface.  Something that has been sanitized has had most of the micro-organisms killed on a surface. 

To put it another way, sterilization usually takes more than a single method to achieve the total destruction of all micro-organisms.  Chemicals and heat, heat and pressure, pressure and radiation or some combination thereof.  Disinfection is usually achieved through the use of a chemicals alone.  Rubbing alcohol, iodine and even vodka are all good disinfectants.  Sanitization is, at least in my experience, a solution that you can have prolonged skin contact with and it won’t harm you.  Take a chemical such as Five Star Star San, to make a sanitizer the directions are to use 1 oz. in 5 gallons of water.  This is a no-rinse solution that you just leave it to dry and the surface is good to use.  To take that same chemical up to disinfectant levels would require 5-10 times as much, and I believe that it would require rinsing before use.  If your water looks like mine, this could be a problem of re-introducing micro-organisms to the surface you just prepared.

After all that, remember that what isn’t clean can’t be sanitized.  I thought I understood and was successfully applying these principles in my brewery until hearing a “Brew Strong” podcast from The Brewing Network on sanitization with Jon Herskovitz from Five Star Chemical.  While this may sound like Jon is hawking his wares via the Brew Strong show, what I found is that Jon is very conscious of this perception and is reluctant to discuss what makes the Five Star products superior in every respect.  The hosts had to drag out these facts from Jon.  After listening to this, I ordered a large container of PBW and put the Oxiclean back in the laundry room.

As a test of this “new” knowledge, I filled my brew-kettle with five gallons of water and the properly measured amount of PBW.  After heating the water to 130 F (about hot water from your sink temperature), I pumped it through the entire brewery, one piece at a time.  The “gunk” that was removed from the pot and equipment was astounding.  As you can see from the picture, most of the gunk is hop matter that had adhered to various surfaces, mostly in my plate chiller.  I had just boiled the plate chiller in a pot on the stove to get out all the “gunk”.  As you may guess, that wasn’t very effective.  Knowing what I wrote above, how can this have possible been sanitary?  You can also see a line of scale circling the inside of the pot.  This is just from the steam of the warm PBW.  I did have to scrub at that some the get it off. 

Take-away from this?  Using a more expensive, no-scrub cleaner isn’t about being lazy and not wanting to scrub;  it’s about using the proper product to ensure the brewery is “clean” so that it can be sanitized.  I have never had a beer show signs of infection in the bottle or keg but that doesn’t mean I’m good, just lucky.  I’d rather be good, that is more reproducible.  Good thing all that old beer is gone. Or is it?