Have you found a good caustic cleaner yet? I use CIPTON (vc11).. Only 1 of my lhbs has it.. He gets it from a brewery...
edmanster said:Have you found a good caustic cleaner yet? I use CIPTON.. Only 1 of my lhbs has it.. He gets it from a brewery...
ThreeBrothersBrewery said:Sounds like someone visits Art's.
Did you try the distilled water in the keg test?
Also remember that Beer is micro biologically stable, that is why you cant get sick from drinking beer.
OK. I noticed this thread made Facebook (yay, I'm famous) and all of a sudden traffic shot up. Here's what's going on right now.
Last night I bottled off the funkified beer, and kicked another keg which is unknown if it's caused me problems (the last batch in it was pretty stale, but it was nearly 10 months old).
So this morning I half-filled both with hot water and OxyClean and sealed them up tight. Soaked an hour rightside up and an hour upside down. I then disassembled them, scrubbed out the inside, removed and discarded o-rings, scrubbed the dip tubes and put the pieces in hot OxyClean to soak. After scrubbing I felt around the inside of both kegs and they both feel squeaky clean. Smell test indicates nothing off.
I dumped the OxyClean, rinsed once with cold water, dumped, filled again with cold water, added 2 tablespoons of bleach, and they're soaking now for an hour.
I have brand new o-rings, beverage post disconnects, beer lines, and hex nut washers. After rinsing everything thoroughly (making sure the chlorine is out of the kegs, possibly using campden) I'll sanitize the pieces and kegs in star san, assemble and seal, shake around, open up, invert the kegs to drain out, then purge the kegs with CO2 3 times before racking.
It takes about 12-24 hours for the bad taste to show up, so I'll report back tomorrow on the results.
So... a couple hours ago I just by chance happened to feel the inside of one of my gas QDs... and it was pretty gunky.
I sniffed... and it smelled pretty close to the flavor that's been plaguing my beers. Apparently I got some beer up in my gas line at some point, and never checked the line.
I sprayed the thing out with star san, wiped it clean and hooked it up. Will report back tomorrow on the results.
lots of good advice here. I am having the same issues, but it seems like a regiment change is in order.
I have been having a very similar problem. I wash with pbw, star san, then purge/keg. Beer tastes fine at this point from the tap while flat. A few weeks later I would have a bitter, metallic taste. This last batch, I rinsed as usual (I'm a water waster and figured I was rinsing enough). After my normal rinse procedure everything seemed good, no residue feeling inside the keg. I then filled it up all the way in the driveway where I had good sunlight. I could see very few grains of the pbw still floating in the water. Not much, but it was there. I rinsed the crap out of the keg again and sanitized and kegged. One month later, no bitter metallic taste and a very fine Scotch ale running low. I'm kegging up a couple this week and hopefully will have the same results.
I think that’s my issue. I soaked the lines and connectors, but I was using hose water that only comes out at 70ish degrees and probably didn’t do a great job cleaning.You need to thoroughly rinse after using PBW. I didn't see that in your process.
Try heating a solution of Beer Line Cleaner to 140F and pumping it through the taps and lines for twenty minutes. You'll be surprised at the shmutz that it dissolves from 'cleaned' beer lines.
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