Home Brewing Equipment For Sanitizing

Good home brewing equipment for sanitizing is important in the final production of any batch of beer. Safety first is a common statement for any production process. When brewing beer at home, thorough cleaning means safety. Good sanitizers also mean the best possible tasting beer.

When you begin browsing different websites or looking at catalogs because you’re interested in home brewing equipment, you may notice a lot of very large and pointed ads that strongly encourage you to buy their sanitizers and sanitizing products for homebrewing. Your first thought might be that this is just a waste of time; you can just wash your own fermenting containers, airlocks, and boiling pots at home in the sink or dishwasher with regular dishwashing detergent or soap. After all, if that bottle of Palmolive is good enough for your plates and glasses, it should be good enough for your home brewing equipment, right? Actually, there’s a reason why those sanitizers are advertised right along with your homebrew equipment, and a reason why you should be using those supplies rather than a basic dishwashing soap.

Home brewing equipment is not like any other set of dishes or cookware in your home. It’s highly unlikely that you have active cultures and live microbial elements in your other dishes; most of the food that you eat is dead and cooked. When you add yeast to your mixture, that yeast reacts with the sugar in your wort, which is what eventually turns to alcohol. However, any residual amounts of yeast and sugar left over in your home brewing equipment will continue to react with each other, even if you can’t see that going on with the naked eye.

Allowing these microbial elements to flourish without getting rid of them is definitely going to affect all of your later batches of beer, and may even introduce harmful bacteria that can make you sick, if they’re not taken care of properly. Most manufacturers of home brewing equipment recommend that you do indeed wash the equipment with hot water or with dish soap, but that you then sanitize everything right after. This sanitizing step does more than just remove surface dirt, which is all that washing and rinsing is going to do for your home brewing equipment. Rather, it removes all traces and elements of your previous batches and doesn’t allow them to continue to flourish.

Remember that brewing is a chemical process and that yeast is an active culture, not something dead like meat or eggs. You can wash your regular dinner dishes in hot water and soap and be assured that everything is properly cleaned, but your home brewing equipment is more like lab equipment than dinner dishes. It needs to have all traces of your “experiments” or brewing processes removed in order to be ready for your next batch.

So don’t hesitate when you see those advertisements for sanitizers made especially for home brewing equipment. The manufacturers aren’t encouraging you to buy them just so that they’ll make more money; they know that this is a very important step in having a successful brewing process.

The commercials and ads for homebrew supplies and equipment usually provide good information on products for brewing beer. Typically they are quite affordable. Plus, they can be very helpful in the continued safe development of a finely brewed beer as well as being important additions to your home brewing equipment .

 

Author: Willam Goodall
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