The first free rules of making beer are: 1) Sanitation, 2) Sanitation and 3) Sanitation. As boring as it sounds, without proper sanitation, a batch of hard-earned beer can go bad very quickly. So it is very important that everything that comes into contact with your beer after it has been boiled is clean and sanitary. Cleaning is easy, some household detergent, water and a little elbow grease will do the trick. Not to mention, you can usually tell by eye when something is clean (is there any dirt left on it?). Sanitation is a little trickier. When sanitising or sterilising something you are trying to kill all, or at least 99.9% of bacteria and other organisms on the surface. If enough of these microbes make it into your beer they can compete with the yeast for food and, rather than making alcohol, the bad organisms might make something that doesn’t taste that good, and isn’t as fun as alcohol.
Luckily, there are a few tried and tested ways to ensure that your equipment is properly sterilised before bottling or fermenting your beer, and there are a few products that have taken almost all of the guess-work out of the process. I’ll go over some of my preferred methods, starting with the most readily available options. THe table below is a quick reference for you to see the pros and cons of the various methods I’m about to discuss:
| Sanitiser | Pros | Cons |
|
Pasteurising
|
Basically Free | Doesn’t clean |
| Handy and easy to do | Not suitable for all surfaces/materials | |
| No rinsing required | Long contact time | |
|
Household Bleach
|
Easy to find | Requires heavy rinsing |
| Very cheap | A little complicated to use properly | |
| Cleans and sanitises | Concentrate can damage clothing and skin | |
| Long contact time | ||
|
Oxygen-based cleaners
|
Cleans and sanitises | Requires a lot of rinsing |
| Powder is easy to store and clean up | Weighing powder can be difficult | |
| Does not produce bubbles | Fairly long contact time | |
| Relatively cheap and available | ||
|
Campden Tablets
|
Readily available | Does not clean |
| Does not sanitise completely | ||
| Rinsing required | ||
| Very long contact time required | ||
|
Star San (acid-based)
|
Cleans and sanitises | Somewhat specialist and not readily available |
| No rinsing required | ||
| Short contact time | ||
| Non-harmful | ||
| Can be reused | ||
| Can be stored and sprayed | ||
| Easy to prepare | ||
|
Iodophor
|
Works extremely well | Heavy rinsing required |
| Does not clean | ||
| Relatively expensive |
1. Pasteurising: This is basically a fancy way of saying sterilising using boiling water or steam. This method works very well and I will often use it to sanitise my thermometer, spoon and sieve before transferring beer into my fermentor. To do this I simply add these items to my wort during the last 10 minutes of the boil and cover the pan with a lid. 10 minute contact time is enough to assume that the equipment is sterile. Not everything can be pasteurised though, some plastic equipment and glass cannot be sterilised using hot water as they will either melt or crack. For these items, a softer approach is required.
2. Household Bleach (chlorine-based cleaners): Yes, common household bleach makes a great sanitiser for your brewing equipment. It is very important when using bleach that you read the instructions carefully and take care to remove all traces of is after you are finished. The bleach bottle should give you appropriate dilution factors (e.g. 1 part bleach to 20 parts water) that will be different with each brand. They may also give an appropriate contact time for sterilisation. This means the amount of time that it takes for the bleach to kill all of the bacteria. PAY ATTENTION TO ALL OF THESE INSTRUCTIONS and do not be tempted to ‘do more’.
The difficulty with bleach comes with rinsing. Most household products will have a bleach component and a surfactant component which will make bubbles if sloshed about too much. These can be difficult to remove but THEY MUST BE REMOVED as, not only do they impact flavour, but they can also be harmful. After you have all of the bubbles out, be sure to keep rinsing until the smell of bleach is completely gone. Again, this can be harmful but more than anything, will impact flavour and may actually kill some of your precious yeast.
FULL DISCLOSURE: there is a method out there to increase the efficacy of bleach and speed-up the clean up process by diluting and then adding vinegar. I will not go into this here as it is very easy to mess up which can be immediately dangerous to your health because it generates chlorine. I have a PhD in chemistry and I still do not use this method as it is easy to get wrong at home. But, in the interests of being fully transparent, I have included a link to an article on it here.
3. VPW and other Oxygen-based cleaners: VPW is a brand of oxygen-based sanitiser that seems like it has been around since beer itself. Like bleach, these cleaners will also clean and sanitise your equipment but they will do so without generating lots of bubbles. This makes clean-up much easier. Much like bleach, however, they do come with a certain smell that, whilst not unpleasant in any way, must be rinsed out before you can trust your equipment to be ready to use.
These cleaners generally come in a powder form and must be dissolved in water before use. Again, be sure to follow the instructions on the container to the letter. This can be slightly more difficult when using a powder as you may have to weigh-out very small quantities of material. A good thing though, is that a little goes a very long way and it is very cheap to begin with.
4. Campden Tablets (metabisulfite sanitation): Those who are accustomed to making wine will know all about campden tablets. Campden tablets are used to kill-off any yeast that remain in solution at the end of wine making so that your wine doesn’t end up too-dry or even carbonated. It may seem obvious then that these can be used to sanitise equipment. Unfortunately it is not quite that simple. Campden will kill wild yeasts and SOME bacteria but not all of it. Furthermore, campden tablets are not very good for cleaning equipment and so if you are intending to sterilise using campden, be sure to clean your equipment first.
5. Star San HB and other no-rinse Sanitisers: It cleans, it sterilises, it even rinses itself! No, I don’t have shares in this company, it’s just the sanitiser that I use the most. Other no-rinse sanitisers are available, but Star San is my go-to so I’ll use that as my major example. Star San is a liquid, phosphoric acid based sanitiser that comes in a bottle that has a cool self-measuring segment. This means that you can accurately dilute it without needing any other equipment. Above all else, this is a no-rinse sanitiser with a low contact time. This means that any bubbles that are generated and any residue that is left on the surface is non-harmful to people, yeast or beer. This means that Star San can even be used as a spray that can be used to cover a large surface area very quickly which can be used (without rinsing) 90 seconds later.
The biggest down-side to Star San is the cost. It is a little more expensive initially than other sanitisers however, the per-use cost is very very low. Once diluted, Star San can be stored and kept for a very long time AND not only that, but can also be reused. This brings me to the second downside: if you buy a bottle of Star San, you’d better have a good place to put it, as you’ll have it for a very long time!
6. Iodophor (and other iodine-based sanitisers): These things kill EVERYTHING! If you have are brewing in a place that has mould, fungus or naturally occurring yeasts (and you can’t move somewhere else) then iodophor is the sanitiser for you. Unlike other sanitisers, this will kill an extremely broad range of microbes.
If you’ve ever seen a hospital drama, iodophor is the brown stuff that they paint on people before surgery. Whilst this is a pretty good endorsement of it’s sterilising power, you will probably have noticed that it has an extremely strong colour! Therefore, iodophor requires HEAVY rinsing after use. In fact, if there’s any iodophor left, it will almost definitely stop your fermentation from taking place as, like I said, it kills EVERYTHING including brewers yeast. Also, if you thought that Star San was expensive, iodophor probably isn’t the product for you.
And that is our list of Sanitisers! Sanitation isn’t cool but it is extremely important!
Happy Brewing,
Jim