What are YOUR best practices for sanitation at brew/bottling/kegging time?
I have trolled a lot of threads posted by this community on various topics of interest while searching for answers to my questions, or just drifting through the different conversations. By now we should all know the importance of proper sanitation; however, unless a thread is responding to a specific question, I quite often see "good sanitation practices" mentioned as an abstract reference. And the detailed suggestions are quite widely scattered throughout thousands of threads.
Of course there are the generic basics: use gear that is in good repair and thoroughly clean all equipment of debris before and after use, use one of the many sanitizing solutions to cleanse anything that will come into contact with your beer (at least ONE of them will fit your brew setup), and avoid anything that might unnecessarily expose your beer to the risk of unwanted infection. For the purposes of this thread, we can take these items for granted.
What I want to start a discussion on is what do you do to KEEP your equipment sanitary during the brewing process. What best practice do you employ to avoid cross contamination or to assure that you didn't forget to prep a critical item? What have you found works for your particular system? Hell, what didn't work?
I am not trying to over-think proper sanitation, but I would like to flesh out those "good sanitation practices" beyond just clean and sanitize.
Please share!
I have trolled a lot of threads posted by this community on various topics of interest while searching for answers to my questions, or just drifting through the different conversations. By now we should all know the importance of proper sanitation; however, unless a thread is responding to a specific question, I quite often see "good sanitation practices" mentioned as an abstract reference. And the detailed suggestions are quite widely scattered throughout thousands of threads.
Of course there are the generic basics: use gear that is in good repair and thoroughly clean all equipment of debris before and after use, use one of the many sanitizing solutions to cleanse anything that will come into contact with your beer (at least ONE of them will fit your brew setup), and avoid anything that might unnecessarily expose your beer to the risk of unwanted infection. For the purposes of this thread, we can take these items for granted.
What I want to start a discussion on is what do you do to KEEP your equipment sanitary during the brewing process. What best practice do you employ to avoid cross contamination or to assure that you didn't forget to prep a critical item? What have you found works for your particular system? Hell, what didn't work?
I am not trying to over-think proper sanitation, but I would like to flesh out those "good sanitation practices" beyond just clean and sanitize.
Please share!