Clean your stuff..seriously

[mattdee1]

How do you eradicate beer stone? I am able to minimize it, but never quite get rid of it.

You need something acidic. I tend to get some build up on the bottom of my kettle. Recently I left about 1" of Star San in the bottom of the kettle for several days, and the gunk peeled off like masking tape.

 

[beernutz]

To each his own but I am with the contingent that focuses on post boil equipment cleaning and sanitation. I use just hot water saved from cooling with an immersion chiller to clean the mash tun and boil kettle using a Scotch Brite pad after each brew. I also run that hot water through the wort pump and any silicon tubing which came in contact with wort.

Maybe once a year I'll get the Barkeepers Friend out and shiny up the inside of the boil keggle. I've been doing it that way for more than a decade.

 

[itsnotrequired]

Maybe once a year I'll get the Barkeepers Friend out and shiny up the inside of the boil keggle. I've been doing it that way for more than a decade.

i just did that for the first time, after about 15 brews. i let the kettle soak in hot pbw for an hour or so and while it cleaned it up a little but, there was still obvious staining. whipped out the barkeepers friend and damn, that thing was like a mirror after only a couple minutes work. i'm probably not going to bother with pbw soaks of the kettles anymore, reserving that more for the hoses and pumps.

 

[MaryB]

Mash tun gets a cold water rinse and a scrub with a green scouring pad to get stuck grain off, then rinsed until clean inside, HLT gets tipped upside down to dry, boil kettle gets hot water I collect in the mash tun(secondary hot rinse after it is clean) from the immersion chiller. I use the same green scrub pad to make sure any stuck on gunk is gone then a cold water rinse and dried by inverting. Mash tun is dried by inverting also. Inverted keeps the garage bugs from invading too!

Valves I connect the hose to and I work the valve back and forth 15-20 times(you should see the gunk that comes out the first 4-5 open/close cycles) then a final rinse before I invert the MT and BK to dry.

 

[MaryB]

Why I went 3 tier gravity fed. HLT gets tipped upside down to dry when empty(after all it just had 170 degree water), MT gets a cold water rinse/scrub with a kitchen green scrubber(stainless) then a cold water second rinse and put back on the burner. BK gets the green scrubby then rinsed with hot water from the immersion chiller I put in the MT, then a final cold water rinse of the MT and BK to flush the valves as I open/close them a bunch of times.

Takes me 15 minutes to finish cleanup after the wort is in the fermenter. After a 5+ hour brew session that is all I want to spend.

I might use PBW in the BK every 20-30 batches if to much beer stone is building up and the scrubber pad isn't taking it off.

I guess I'm pretty normal in terms of cleanliness. I clean my kettle well enough that there's no scum or debris visible, but I don't go at every blemish until it's spotless either. My immersion chiller gets rinsed and wiped until there's nothing actually clinging to it, but I don't really take it farther than that. Fermenters get cleaned with pbw until there's nothing visible on them and rinsed very well afterward.

I don't have a complex system that requires pumps and the like though. One of my holdups with such a setup is having to clean all the little nooks and crannies such a system would necessarily have. I like to be able to clean things while I'm brewing and at most have another 30 minutes of cleaning to do after the brew is in the fermenter. There's definitely something to be said for having nothing but a simple, un-ported, not connected to anything else, pot to clean at the end.

 

[radwizard]

I clean my cold side stuff very well. I don't see the reason to clean my boil kettle, or mash tun with any more effort then cleaning a kitchen pot. I try to keep it presentable, but that about it...