Sanitizing

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yegnal

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Just made a mash tun and added a ball valve to a kettle using stainless, weldless 1/2" FPT fittings on both.

My questions are if I should dismantle both to thoroughly clean after using each time, and what is best practice to sanitize the ball valve on the kettle before allowing the chilled wort to pass through it on its way to the fermenter ?
 
I wouldn’t worry about dismantling to clean. I’m pretty lax about cleaning preboil things. Of course, the kettle is the crossover from preboil to post boil. Get ready to cringe, but I don’t even rinse it out at the start of brew day. I’m with you on best sanitizing practice for the spigot. I just spray it inside and out with Starsan after the boil. It’s not like you can dismantle it at that point!
 
I dismantle all valves every 3rd brew. Clean, sanitize, teflon tape, brew....
 
I just dismantled mine this morning for a soak in percarbonate. Only reason is i find a bit of gunk can build up inside it takes one minute to take apart and soak no biggie. Now as for sanitation i just rinse with fresh water and around 15 or so to go in boil i just run some boiling wort out through the valve to kill anything left alive.
 
I run cleaner through the whole system then star-sans, I don't take my ball valves apart, I have a stainless brush that I run through each
 
Does anyone alternate between starsan an iodophor? A recent Experimental Brewing podcast spoke briefly about yeasts, and a possible need to at least alternate (sanitizer). This came up on the topic of Left Hand Brewing's lawsuit against White Labs. It's been awhile since I heard it, but I think it was along the lines of a yeast strain that can remain fairly dormant for awhile and doesn't cause much of a problem unless beer sits for awhile. If I remember right, it would start fermenting again in the containers. I think Left Hand is the most recent case so that's why it came up... totally off topic I know. Just curious.
 
as for ferment vessels I use bleach after long storage meaning more than a month soaked over night then cleaned normally
 
I tend to go with the "less is more" camp on this one. The ball valve gets pretty much sterilized through the heat of the boil. I never mess with the ball valve on my kettle, rather let the heat do its job. If it were on the cold side, dismantle and clean thoroughly every few brews and you'll be fine.
 
here's what I do normally when brewing regularly, I just use cleaner with a brush then star-sans but the brush is the key, yeast will not feed unless theirs sugar, you remove the sugar and dry in the sun and the yeast die. after being lazy and storing my equipment not perfectly clean I use bleach
 
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I'm running a plate chiller so I've gotten into the habit of cleaning everything in the post-boil stream in a certain way:
- After wort is run through chiller and into fermenter, I hose out the boil kettle and run clean water both ways through the chiller.
- Fill brew pot with several gallons of PBW and pump through for several minutes.
- Leave until next brew day
- On brew day, heat several gallons of PBW and pump through chiller both ways for about 20 minutes
- Leave PBW in chiller while prepping for mash
- After dough-in/strike drain and rinse boil pot and chiller with 2-3 gallons of water and configure chiller for hookup later.
- Set up mash tun for recirc, mash as usual, collect wort and sparge (using pump).
- At 15 minutes left in boil, connect pump to boil pot and chiller plate and clear any water from the system let run for at least 10 minutes
- At flame out, hook up cooling water to chiller plate and start to recirc/chill
- Fill fermenter with chilled wort.
- Repeat
If brew day is relatively early, I'll heat PBW after I'm done for cleaning the chiller, but if it's a late one, I'll tack that part onto the beginning of the next brew day. Rinsing thoroughly is the key and running/soaking hot PBW at some point is important for keeping anything from building up. I don't worry about ball valves, though it's good to run them full open when cleaning/sanitizing. When I was just draining the boil pot and not running a chiller, I'd run a few quarts through and pour back into the boil pot during the last few minutes of boil just to be sure the fittings were clear and heated to boiling temp.
 
I wash everything after every brew and give it a good scrub with hot water, I've taken the ball valves apart once in 8 months and it wasn't worth the hassle so I just flush lots of hot water through them after the brew day. If you clean your mash tun and whatnot while your boil is starting it is easier to clean and quick.

My immersion chiller just gets hosed off after I am done with it and then rinsed and boiled for the next batch.
 
Wow......I over clean!
I take apart all the SS ball valves after every brew day, run all their parts through the dishwasher toss into Oxyclean then reassemble. My Mash Tun is a rectangle cooler with copper tubing and it gets taken apart and rinsed with hot water as well as the Tun.
Star San get sprayed onto or touches everything on brewday.
 
I wash MT and BK with PBW and rinse with water after every brew day. I don’t dismantle valves. I do spray the BK valve opening with star-sans.

Our 5 gal kegged batches don’t last much more than a few weeks. So not too worried about infections.
 
I just caution against never cleaning your ball valve. Yes it gets heated up durin the boil even more so if you use gas to heat your kettle but i know mine sticks out a fair way from the kettle so it aint copping the heat it used to and its a two piece not that that should matter.

I got onto it after reading that brulosophy article awhile back where one of malcomes brew buddies coulntd put his finger on where his contamination issue was comming from to the point where he was on the verge of throwing in the brew towel. Finally he took about his ball valve and it was caked up with brown sludge.

I went and checked mine and yes it wasnt quite so bad but there was dome muck built up in there.

I clean mine out periodically and lately because im going to be brewing light lager style beers so just wanted to dot all my eyes and vross my T s in anticipation for good clean smashable lager to come yum yum!
 

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I'm not that worried about hot-side muck. I generally don't run the wort out through the kettle valve (dump or siphon) so I don't worry too much about it on the cold side, either.
 
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