luckybeagle
Making sales and brewing ales.
I've brewed 6 or 7 AG batches so far and haven't had an infection yet, but I'm curious if my sanitation process is adequate, overkill, or...? Here's what I do:
I bottle exclusively, and I always rinse my bottles out with hot water immediately after pouring a beer. On bottling day, I rinse again, then fill up each one with water/starsan and let sit for 15 minutes. I shake them out vigorously and then proceed to bottle using a sanitized bottling wand hooked up to a sanitized bottling bucket, capping with sanitized caps.
Is this sufficient? Overkill? Can you see ways I should improve my process?
- After brew day, I rinse out my kettle and generally let my plate chiller (gravity fed) sit without cleaning it. Shame I know but since I brew at night it's usually 1am when I wrap up and I'm just too tired to sterilize anything at that point
- Within a few days, I hook up the wort inlet to my garden hose and blast it out in both directions for 30 seconds - 1 minute.
- Afterward, I fill up my kettle with 10 gallons of water with 1/2 cup bleach. I let that sit in the kettle for 10-15 minutes, wash down the sides with a sponge then drain it all through the plate chiller.
- After the bleach solution is done, I immediately boil 10 gallons of plain water and run it through the plate chiller from the BK
- Finally, I make up a fresh batch of sanitizer using Star San and again run it through the kettle and plate chiller. At this step I run a gallon or so from the BK to plate chiller and then into a freshly bleached and well-rinsed 6.5g glass carboy. I save all of the sanitizer for brew and bottling day at this point (I store it in a cooler).
- Shake the carboy with sanitizer solution and let sit for 15 minutes or so, then dump out and "cap" with sanitized foil
- Cap wort inlet and outlet on plate chiller with sanitized foil
I bottle exclusively, and I always rinse my bottles out with hot water immediately after pouring a beer. On bottling day, I rinse again, then fill up each one with water/starsan and let sit for 15 minutes. I shake them out vigorously and then proceed to bottle using a sanitized bottling wand hooked up to a sanitized bottling bucket, capping with sanitized caps.
Is this sufficient? Overkill? Can you see ways I should improve my process?