Shirron Chiller Cleaning (Desperate Matters!)

Hey guys,

A little background to this... I bought a Shirron chiller a couple years ago and brewed with it once. Afterwards, I was negligent enough to not clean it out... Not even a rinse. On top of it, that day I had brewed an IPA so there was definitely a good amount of hop residue in there. Now, this is all fine and dandy, but the real problem is that afterwards, I took a break from brewing for about a year.

Now that I am back and brewing again, I have been trying to clean the chiller out. I have gotten a ton of hop particles out and a lot of other gunk that had built up for a year. I have looked at different things people have suggested on here including soaking in PBW and pumping it through the chiller (backflow) with a siphon as well as running some boiling water through it. It seems like no matter what I do, though, there are still some hop particles that are ready to come loose when I run anything through it.

I really want to be able to use this piece of equipment as I had great success with it the one time I did use it. I am just not sure what I can do to successfully get it fully clean and be sure that it is free of particles so I can sanitize it.

If anyone has any advice to offer it would be greatly appreciated. Like I said, I have used PBW on it and ran boiling water through it already so any advice beyond those things would be great.


Thanks all. Cheers.

 

You can try baking it in the oven at its highest setting for a couple of hours 'til everything inside turns to ash. If the oven has a self-cleaning function, even better. Then flush in both directions..

Cheers!

 

Another option is to use a 2% caustic soda solution, pour it in the chiller, let it sit for an hour or so and flush it out really well. Just be warned it is very corrosive stuff, avoid getting in contact with it and wash/rinse everthing of really thoroughly. another option is to fill your brew kettle with it and pump it round to get more thourough cleaning.
A HBT thread/post on the subject:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/how-clean-your-chillplate-448543/#post5793156