cleaning corny keg lines

What's the best way to clean the liquid lines? Right now I have the beer out line connected to a simple picnic tap.

haven't kegged yet but do have the same question. \

would filling the keg with water and putting a sanatizer solution in it and carbing then running it through the beer line through the tap just like if it were kegged with beer work?

I typically run sanitizer through the lines in between each keg. Every couple months I also treat the lines with a beer line cleaner, such as BLC, to get rid of beer stone.

Once a month I do a thorough cleaning. I mix up a 1 gallon solution of BLC & water in a corny keg, and run 1/2 of it through all the lines, shanks, & faucets. I let it sit for 15 minutes in the lines, then remove the faucets, disassemble them, and soak them in the BLC solution that I collected w/ the first flush. Once they've sat for 20-30 minutes I rinse & reinstall them, then flush the remaining BLC solution, followed by about 1/2 gallon of cold water. That takes care of all the lines, shanks, faucets and to some extent, the disconnects.

For ordinary keg swaps, I just run some iodophor solution through everything and skip the water rinse. I disassemble the disconnects (unscrew the top so I can remove the poppet, spring, etc. and soak them in sanitizer) and then let everything drip dry for a minute or two before tapping the new keg.

EDIT- I meant to add, the easiest way to clean a setup w/ a picnic tap is to unscrew the top of the disconnect, removing the spring and poppet, and also unscrew the picnic tap end, removing the valve/handle part. Soak those parts in sanitizer. Then you can run hot water, followed by sanitizer (via gravity) through the lines and the body of the tap and disconnect. Let it sit a minute, then drain it all out, reassemble everything, and you are good to go. I also like to swab down the keg posts w/ sanitizer to make sure that nothing nasty can get into the keg when I reconnect everything.

Everytime I change out a keg I run sanitized water through the line, then I run tap water through it. Every 2 or 3 months I clean the faucets and just about everything else.

I don't do this nearly enough, but I run Beer Line Cleaner throught the lines and clean out the facucets with the same solution. Every so often I also change out the CO2 lines too.

Whenever I blow a keg, I just shake up a quart of warm, diluted BLC (diluted according to the directions) in the keg and run it out the liquid post, through the liquid line and picnic tap, under low pressure. Then, I rinse out the keg, shake up a bunch of sanitizer in the keg and run some of that through the liquid line to rinse it out. After that, I just put the whole liquid ilne assembly aside until I need it again. It does not get any simpler.


TL

The first thing I do is run hot water thru the lines and picnic tap. Then I'll use a standard strenght solution of Star-San that I push it thur the lines and from corny to corny using compressed air.

I don't see any need to buy a separate cleaner just for the lines. Star-San is a phosphoric acid sanitizer that can easily double as a cleaning solution. In the past almost all soap products were made using phosphoric acid before it became a politically incorrect environmental issue.

If I feel they really need good cleaning ie. I got lazy and let beer dry in them I'll pull a wire thru with pipe cleaners attached to the end and double the Star-San concentration.

The key is to never let your kegs run dry, if you do, they are going to be a ***** to clean. As soon as one is kicked immediately attach another or fill the empty keg up with some water and star san and run that through so the insides don't dry out. If that stuff dry's out inside you are in for some major PITA cleaning.

I personally keep a keg of star san sitting around just for the purpose of hooking up to my taps when a beer runs dry. It is also a good way to store the all purpose sanitizer.