How Professional Brewery's Clean/Sanitize

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.

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.

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.

dgoldb1 said:

I hear professional brewers saying they use a hot caustic rinse and then an acid to sanitize.

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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.

JadeMonkeyStang said:

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

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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.

mpcluever said:

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.

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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.

dgoldb1 said:

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?

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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.

bdjohns1 said:

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.

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

JadeMonkeyStang said:

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

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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.

Beerrific said:

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

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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?

Sodium hydroxide (caustic) rinse in place (this does most the cleaning). Followed by acid rinse (this ensures the caustic is neutralized/may provide a small degree of passivation/kill caustic tolerant bugs). The acid can vary but could be acetic acid or citric acid. Water rinses are optional following caustic and acid rinses. All of these would be rinses and little to no manual scrubbing. Auxillary/difficult to clean parts could be soaked out of place in caustic. For the small scale homebrewer rinsing in place just isnt worth the extra equipment.

bdjohns1 said:

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.

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BDJohns1 is correct; it depends on the process. I had something I've been working on in my mind which only requires a caustic loop and water flush, not an acid loop as well. Normally you'll do the caustic and then acid, with optional water rinses before/after each step depending on what you're working with.

Sorry for the temporarily incapacitated brain on that one, I realized the other day that I left some incorrect info and I'm glad others picked up on it and interjected.


To get back to the original question, the homebrew circuit of PBW or Oxyclean followed by StarSan is the equivalent of using caustic followed by an acid. Commercial operations just tend to have very specific products and processes that are used to achieve specific goals while minimizing resources like time and money.