Beer Line Cleaning, why you must ALSO do acid cleaning.

Описание: Caution: There is a lot of awkward editing in this free informational video. We take beer very seriously, however we do not take ourselves to seriously.

The caustic chemical in quality beer line cleaner is sodium hydroxide and is used between 2 and 3% depending on the age and care of your lines. We find it a best practice to just use 3% for bi-weekly draft line maintenance. Every two weeks is prescribed by the Brewer's' Association because all the empirical and lab tests show that this is the point at which bacterial counts start really taking off. When you start going longer than two weeks the bacteria can out grow the cleaning cycle and build up slowly over time, and this can dull the bright notes of hops and sweet notes of malt. Thus, when you are regularly cleaning every 4 or more weeks, bacterial growth begins slowly building up and flavors will most definitely be muted which will lower sales. Most folks won't even know they don't like the beer, however those subtle changes are enough to make someone thing, "hmm, I guess I'm just not feeling beer today'. If the time between cleanings is chronically longer than even that you may start developing off flavors such as Diacetyl (buttery) and Acidic. This can also start happening more quickly if the couplers and faucets aren't also being maintained properly. All of these time lines are sped up if the quality of the cleaning chemical is inferior, and yes, there are a lot of chemicals on the market right now that are cheap knock offs of the real deal. If claims are to good to be true, they are to good to be true. Cutting corners on quality is the same as making the decision to start reducing revenue.

Acid (Phosphoric Acid) maintenance is performed to dissolve beer stone, and for our purposes we'll just call that Calcium Oxalate. This is a maintenance that should be performed at least once a quarter and in conjunction with caustic maintenance. If you don't regularly act to keep this at bay it will build up and cause problems in your draft, such as;
-Choking the beer line effecting the flow of beer causing foam at the faucet and a loss of revenue
-Beer stone absorbs flavors and aromas so there will be flavor creep from one beer to the next which lowers the quality and intended flavor of the beer. This equals lower sales.
-Beer stone will also hold onto cleaner and cleaner dye which makes it harder to clear all of the chemical out of the lines after cleaning and that is just dangerous
-if the problem gets bad enough flecks of this beer stone will chip away and make it into the patrons glass. Gross.

So how do you measure the chemical for use? In this example we are using Micro Matic Alkaline (Caustic) Beer Line Cleaner and Acid Beer Line Cleaner. This outline shows you how to determine how much water you will be mixing with.

For this example we'll say we have an 8 line system at 50 feet (cooler to faucet) and that we have 6 foot beer jumpers.

1.) Determine the ID (Interior Diameter) of the beer line.
1/4"ID = .33oz 5/15" ID = .5oz 3/8" ID = .75oz per foot of beer line.

2. If one beer line is 50 feet from the cooler to the faucet we multiply that by the .75oz per foot in the beer line. =37.5oz

3. Take the average length of a jumper at 6 feet and multiply that by .75oz per foot = 4.5oz (honestly, these could be made from 5/16th to save more waste at cleanings)

4. So we have 42 ounces of beer in one draft line. Multiply that by 8 beer lines to get 336oz in the draft system.

5. Figure out how many gallons the draft system is. One gallon is 128 ounces so we divide that into the 336 ounces to get 2.6 gallons.

6. In circulation maintenance you will have a reservoir that the pump draws from and returns chemical to. Lets say this reservoir is 1.4 gallons to keep math easy. This means you have a total of 5 gallons of liquid between the reservoir and the draft system.

7. You now determine how much chemical you will add to the reservoir to get the strength you want.

8. The cleaner we are using makes a 1% solution in 1 gallon of water with one Cap full of cleaner. Technically to the very top of the cap its 4 oz but to just under the gripping lip it is 3.5oz so that is what we'll use for this. (Micro Matic lists 3.33oz as the actual volume for the 1%, which is equal to 100ml)

9. With Caustic you want a 2% solution for newer and well-maintained lines. For older or poorly maintained lines you want 3%. We have just made 3% our standard. With Acid you want 1%.

10. If you are measuring by caps then you can say for a 3% Caustic Solution you need 3 caps of cleaner per gallon. Since there are 5 gallons you need 15 caps of cleaner. Or instead of caps, if one cap should represent 3.5oz, you multiply the two to get the need of 52.5oz of cleaner in the reservoir to create a 3% caustic solution.

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