dgoldb1

Recipes 

I hear professional brewers saying they use a hot caustic rinse and then an acid to sanitize. When I clean with hot PBW and sanitize with StarSan, is this the same thing?

Btw: meant to type breweries in the title. Stupid iPad auto correct.

surf71

Recipes 

It's the same in that you're doing the same thing cleaning and sanitizing but they are using much more powerful stuff. You also have to think that you can get in and scrub your fermenter/carboy/bucket, relatively easy, where a 30+BBL system won't let you get in there and scrub the same way.

Beerrific

Recipes 

Many professional breweries use caustic, rinse, use an acid (designed to be an acid cleaner and SS passivator), rinse, and then use another acid (PAA for example) to sanitize.

JadeMonkeyStang

Recipes 

Just hot caustic and then water to rinse. That will get things nice and sanitary.


*** My original response above is incomplete, due to a partially fried brain.
Please see post #12 for what I should have posted here.

mpcluever

Recipes 

True, except that most homebrewers don't really have access to caustic.

As the OP said, a soak in PBW and a rinse in Star San is going to be fine with some scrubbing as needed.

bdjohns1

Recipes 

Last I checked, PBW is caustic. pH of a 1% solution is 12, according to 5 Star's tech sheet. It's just different from a generic caustic in that it's oxygenated.

bdjohns1

Recipes 

Yes. (putting on dairy plant hat)

PBW is a caustic, and StarSan is an acid sanitizer. We use bulk liquid caustic that's a lot like PBW, and we use a couple of different acids (a phosphoric/nitric blend for general CIP, and a phosphoric that's like StarSan) to CIP our equipment. Some specialized equipment uses slightly different things, but for normal stainless process equipment, that's the standard. Hot for CIP standards tends to be 150-170F or so. No need to boil or anything.

Chemical strengths generally need to be higher for CIP than for manual cleaning, and exposure time needs to be longer. CIP also requires you to follow sanitary design guidelines to ensure that you really do get effective cleaning without going in and scrubbing by hand. No sharp corners, no acute angles, no weld less or threaded connections, no abrupt diameter changes, no hose barbs, etc.

Beerrific

Recipes 

Depends on what your definition of caustic is. Five star labels it a "non-caustic cleaner." Generally, caustic means NaOH.

bdjohns1

Recipes 

Nope. Cleans, but you need something else to be a sanitizer. Lots of bugs out there that can form spores which are resistant to caustic.

When we CIP a transfer line between two products, it will be just a caustic wash with a rinse on either side. After the line has been down for >4 hours, even if it was cleaned, we run an acid sanitizer circuit.

bdjohns1

Recipes 

Their tech sheet describes it as an alternative for "caustic soda cleaners". Caustic soda is a synonym for NaOH. They further describe it as a "buffered alkaline detergent". Alkali cleaners are generally referred to as being caustic, meaning that they act by chemically "burning" organic materials.

Really want to split hairs with a ChemEng?