When to try to deep clean vs. get new equipment after infection

[ahafri]

Hi all! Just recently had an infection, and now I'm going kind of nuts with equipment.

I'm wondering at what point I should toss equipment vs. trying to deep clean my equipment. Budget is an issue, but that being said, obviously keeping the equipment and losing batch after batch is not worth it.

So my questions:
1) After an infection, what is the best way to deep clean equipment (in particular plastics)? PBW? Bleach as well? Something else?
2) Is there a way to tell what equipment should be tossed vs. not?
3) If I were to toss equipment, is it just limited to plastic stuff (buckets, better bottles, airlocks), or anything rubber that touched the infected batch as well?

Apologies if a similar post has already been made. Thanks!

 

[jcav]

Ahafri, if you have plastic or stainless with heavy soil, crud, trub, stains, etc. deep clean it by soaking in PBW. Use a sponge and scrub it good all over and let it soak overnight. Rinse the equipment off with water and now it's clean.

The next step is to sanitize. There are many products out there. Star San is one of the most popular. You can make up a batch in a 5 gallon bucket and soak your equipment in there and pull them out as you are ready to use them. Put some Star San in a spray bottle and spray it on areas that need to be sanitized also. You only need about a minute of contact time with Star San, it does foam a lot if agitated but that's ok, the foam gets in hard to reach places. You do not have to rinse the Star San off your equipment, if made to the correct strength (1 oz in 5 gallons of water). You can also make smaller batches of Star San if you don't want to make up a 5 gallon batch.

You don't have to toss your equipment in the garbage, just make a good effort to clean and sanitize everything as you use it on brew day. If you have deep scratches or gouges in your plastic pail fermenter, you may have to toss that, but that should be the only thing that is suspect (without knowing your equipment). Try the cleaning with PBW and sanitizing with Star San and that should take care of your issue. Hope this helps.....

John

 

[kdw2pd]

When I've had infection problems, I clean thoroughly, soaking and then cleaning with PBW or something similar to get all the gunk out, then aggressively bleach (1 cup bleach per gallon of water) and leave that in the bucket for 4 days or so, rinse with water for 2 days to get the bleach flavor out, and then StarSan for a few days.

 

[ahafri]

Thanks! I will do that and let you all know how it goes!

 

[ChelisHubby]

Don't keep any used and possibly infected plastic hoses, I found out the hard way!

 

[Pappers_]

I agree with the above. Replace any tubing and bleach bomb everything else.