Dirty Sankes

I have used sankes to fermenting. I have a homemade keg washer I used to clean them with. When I first started I tried to use a flashlight and mirror to inspect them. It was hard to peer in but what I could see looked clean, so I just ran the washer and assumed they were clean. I just cut one of them open to make a second keggle. There was some nasty krausen built up in there. Now i am concerned about the cleanliness of them and have ordered a lighted inspection mirror. Photos attached of the nastiness.

I have picked up some older style bellied kegs I was planning on using as my new fermenter. Ran them through the cleaner then inspected. They looked gross. I saw streaks down the side after cleaning as opposed to a small bit of krausen. So I soaked one overnight in Oxyclean solution and still have the streaks now. I am thinking this is some kind of staining not dirt. Should I be concerned? How should I go about cleaning these or prepare them to act as a fermenter?

This is why I'm really starting to not trust contact cleaners and I'm leaning towards more open vessels for fermentation... so I can see if it's clean, and have better access to manual cleaning.

Sounds like beer stone. You'd need something like CLR or other acid cleaner to get that off.

cupido76 said:

This is why I'm really starting to not trust contact cleaners and I'm leaning towards more open vessels for fermentation... so I can see if it's clean, and have better access to manual cleaning.

Click to expand...

I really like the sankes. Only because I can't afford a conical. I am looking into adding a 4" triclover to the top of a sanke or two to act as my primary ferementers, once i figure out all my plumbing options on it.

Here are photos is this beer stone?

I generally do an overnight oxi-clean soak and a brewday length star san soak (yes, the full 15.5 gallons of star san). I would be curious to see what mine looks like.

That's a lot of star san!