A simple cleaning routine for the hours after brew day

Why the next hour matters

Wort is sugar water with protein in it. Left in a kettle or a tube overnight in a warm Indian kitchen, it dries into a sticky film that bacteria and wild yeast love. Once that film hardens it takes ten times the effort to shift. Anything you miss becomes a home for microbes that will meet your next batch.

Cleaning and sanitising are two different jobs. Cleaning removes the soil you can see and feel. Sanitising kills most of what is left on a surface that is already clean. You cannot sanitise dirt, so this routine is about cleaning. Our guide to cleaning versus sanitising covers the difference in detail.

Start while the wort cools

The 30 to 45 minutes you spend chilling wort is the best cleaning window you will get. While the pot sits in its ice bath:

• Empty the grain bag into a bin bag or compost bucket. Spent grain goes sour and smelly within a day in warm weather, so get it out of the house or into the freezer.
• Turn the bag inside out and rinse it under a hard tap until the water runs clear. Then soak it in warm water with an oxygen based brewery cleaner.
• Rinse the mash spoon, thermometer, measuring jug and hydrometer jar. Wipe the counter where wort splashed.

Do not use the kitchen sponge on brewing kit. It carries grease and food bacteria. Any scratches it leaves on plastic become hiding places.

The kettle and its crust

Once the cooled wort is in the fermenter, the kettle is next. You will see a brown ring at the old waterline and a layer of hop debris and protein, called trub, at the bottom. Pour the trub out, then fill the kettle with warm water while it is still warm.

Most of the crust lifts with a soft cloth after twenty minutes of soaking. For a stubborn ring, add an oxygen based cleaner such as one made with sodium percarbonate, at the dose on the pack, in water around 50 to 60 °C. Leave it for half an hour and wipe. Avoid steel wool on stainless steel; it scratches and leaves iron particles that can rust. Do not use bleach on stainless either, as chlorine can pit it.

If you used an immersion chiller, rinse it straight after it comes out of the wort, before the sugar dries on the coils.

Fermenters and tubing

The fermenter you just filled is busy for two weeks. Clean the one you emptied last time now if you left it, along with the siphon and tubing.

• Plastic fermenters: warm water, cleaner and a soft cloth only. No abrasive pads. Scratched plastic cannot be reliably sanitised, so retire a fermenter that is badly scratched.
• Glass carboys: a carboy brush and a soak. Never pour hot water into cold glass.
• Tubing: pump cleaner solution through it, let it soak, rinse well and hang it to drain. Replace tubing once it goes cloudy or stained inside.
• Taps and valves: take them apart. Beer stone and old yeast collect inside the body where you cannot see them.

Rinse, dry and store

Every cleaner needs a thorough rinse with clean water. Residue can affect head retention and flavour. Then dry everything properly. In monsoon humidity, kit that is put away damp grows mould in a cupboard within a week. Turn buckets upside down on a rack, hang bags and tubing in a breezy spot and leave lids off until fully dry.

Store small parts together in a clean, lidded box. On your next brew day all you need to do is sanitise.

Write it in the log

Add a line to your brew log: what you cleaned, anything that needed extra work and anything you noticed. A cracked tap, a scratched fermenter or tubing that smells of old beer is worth writing down. If a batch later tastes sour or medicinal, that log is where you start looking. See our guide to keeping a brew log for a simple format.

Cleaning is dull, but it is the single biggest reason one homebrewer's beer is consistently clean and another's is hit and miss. Commercial brewers spend much of their working day on it for the same reason.