Since 1966, E.C. Kraus has been shipping home wine making and home beer brewing supplies all across the United States. They have honed in on this craft for over 40 years, giving them the know-how and products to get you on the road to successful wine making and beer brewing, starting with your very first batch!

E.C. Kraus has a great blog with tons of tips and advice for homebrewers that we have found very interesting to follow. We had a few questions on cleaning and sanitation in homebrewing, and they were kind enough to jump right on it and provide us with all the information below. A special thanks to E.C. Kraus and David Ackley!

The Introduction of Microbes

The magic of making beer is fermentation. For the uninitiated, beer is produced when yeast consume the sugar in sweet brewer’s wort and turn the sugar into alcohol. Yeast are microbial fungi, and they’re also responsible for fermenting wine and making bread rise.

The first step in the brewing process is to mix water with malted grains to extract fermentable sugars. The sweet, sugary wort is the perfect medium for yeast to feed and reproduce, but it’s also an ideal environment for wild yeast and bacteria, which could potentially ruin a batch. Our job as brewers is to create the tasty brewers wort and maintain strict control over which microflora are introduced as the driving force of fermentation. More often than not, a particular strain of brewer’s yeast is used to develop specific flavor characteristics. Rogue yeast or bacteria could potentially ruin the process.

To prevent contamination we have a few lines of defense:

  • We boil wort to sterilize it;
  • After cooling the wort, we pitch an overwhelming number of viable yeast cells, which ideally out-compete other potential contaminants;
  • We practice strict cleaning and sanitizing procedures to minimize the possibility of introducing foreign microbes.

Many homebrewers can tell you a story about how lax cleaning and sanitation led to the downfall of a batch of beer. Luckily, it only takes one (okay, maybe two) dumped batches to really learn how important cleaning and sanitation are to the brewing process.

The concept of cleaning and sanitation for homebrewers is very straightforward – the key is in the execution. Cutting corners is where homebrewers are most likely to run into trouble. Below, find a basic overview of cleaning and sanitation as it applies to making beer at home.

How to Clean Your Homebrewing Equipment

The important thing to remember is that cleaning and sanitation is a two-step process. First, brewing equipment has to be clean of any and all debris. To accomplish this, we use a food-grade cleaning agent that’s specifically made for the brewing industry. For equipment that’s relatively clean, a long soak will often do the trick. But it’s essential for the homebrewer to visually inspect equipment for buildup. Notorious hiding places include the spigot on the bottling bucket and in bottles. In some cases, stubborn deposits may require some more aggressive scrubbing.

Tip: Thoroughly rinse out beer bottles that you plan to reuse for homebrewing – it makes cleaning them so much easier!

How to Sanitize Your Homebrewing Equipment

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After your equipment is clean, it’s time to sanitize. For this step, we focus on everything that comes in contact with the wort or beer after the boil. For things like the mash tun, which is used before the boil, just making sure it’s clean will be sufficient. Same thing with an immersion wort chiller – placing it in the hot wort during the last few minutes of the boil will be enough to sanitize it. Just make sure it’s clean before you do so!
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As for the fermenter, airlock, and transfer tubing – again, anything that touches the wort after the boil – make sure they are sanitized with a food grade sanitizer. Iodophor and Star-San are two favorites. You simply mix a solution based on the package directions and spray or soak your equipment. All it takes is a couple minutes of contact time followed by an air dry. In a pinch, you can also use unscented household bleach to sanitize your equipment, but it takes about 20 minutes of contact time and you have to rinse with very hot – preferably boiled – water to drive off the chlorine (chlorine does not taste good in beer!).

Then on bottling day, you’ll need to repeat the cleaning and sanitation procedure for beer bottles, caps, transfer tubing, the bottling bucket, and the bottle filler. Don’t skimp here – it would be a shame to have to dump the batch after you’ve come so far! One trick you can use to save some effort: if your bottles are already clean, you can actually run them through the dishwasher on the sanitize cycle. It takes only as long as you need to load and run the dishwasher and much less labor.

Tip: If your beer bottles are already clean, you can sanitize them by running them through the dishwasher on the “high heat” or “sanitize” cycle.

Many brewers will tell you that making beer has much more to do with cleaning than it does with developing recipes. But once you understand why cleaning and sanitizing are so important, it’s easy to see that cleaning and sanitizing are a critical step in the process of making delicious beer.

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David Ackley is a beer writer, homebrewer, and self-described “craft beer crusader.” He holds a General Certificate in Brewing from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling and is the resident beer blogger for E. C. Kraus Home Wine and Beer Making Supplies.