Keeping your home brew stuff clean at all times and sanitizing it is essential for creating clean and fresh tasting beer. The beer brewing process encourages the growth of microbes to accommodate a yeast fermentation. Unwanted bacteria will have a chance to grow as well, so it is best to eliminate it up-front through sanitation.
Your home brewing equipment will come into contact with sugars, malt extract, malted grains, beer yeast, hops, and many other substances. Make sure that all the equipment is sanitized if you wish to brew healthy and delicious beer.
First clean all visible dirt, stains, and dust from your equipment. After this use a sanitizer to kill the invisible microbes. After you have made your wort from the partial mash, if any foreign substance comes into contact with it, your homebrew can become infected. Boiling will kill the bacteria, but after the boiling process has been completed, you need to be extra careful with the resultant beer wort.
Make sure that the brew kettle, beer fermenter, airlock, lauter tun, hoses, utensils, carboys, wort chillers, beer bottles, rubber stoppers, and all other home brewing equipment are properly sanitized. Anything, which is made from plastic, needs to be cleaned with special care. Do not use abrasives such as scouring pads on these product, or this will scratch the plastic – the perfect hideout for bacteria.
While cleaning your equipment make sure that the sanitizers you are using are made for the very purpose. There are many sanitizers on the market that are specifically designed for cleaning homebrew equipment. A few of the more popular ones are: Basic A, Iodophor, B-Brite and Star San. All of these will sanitize you equipment safely and effectively.
