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Help in Cleaning hoff stevens

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  • Help in Cleaning hoff stevens

    I bought a bunch of hoff steven kegs that had been sitting unclean for around three years. I have a standard hoff stevens keg cleaning system and I have used several types of cleaning agents such as sodium hydroxide and pbw and there still is a brown film on the inner surface of the kegs. Could it be beer stone?
    I washed my test kegs for an hour at high temp.(+165F) with sodium hydroxide and let them soak over night with the same solution. This morning I washed the kegs for an additional hour and still the same brown film. I attached a scouring pad to the end of a stick and scrubbed the surface with no result.
    Any suggestions? I am dead in the water with tanks full of beer.
    Mark Duchow
    Brew Master
    Short Fuse Brewing Co.
    Chicagoland
    "The best beer is FREE beer"

  • #2
    Acid

    We had problems with used kegs that we purchased that seemed to have sat around for a long time too.

    Many of them had a light to medium brown coating that I assumed was stone with a build up of beer in it. We soaked the kegs in many types of cleaners and found that our sodium hydroxide based caustic would remove a lot of "color" from the build up but not leave the surface clean.

    We then used a heavy acid solution that worked on most of the kegs- ~32oz of milkstone remover (a blend of phosphoric and nitric acids) in a 1/2 bbl of water soaked overnight. This is 8x the concentration we use for CIP.

    Some of the kegs had such a thick coating that the only way to get the stuff off was to use the acid undiluted. I would pour in enough to coat the bottom, let it soak overnight and then put the keg on its side during the day and roll it around every few hours.

    Whether straight or diluted, we would pump or pour the solution from keg to keg to save on the large qty of chemicals needed to get the things clean.

    Hope this helps!

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    • #3
      2nd on acid

      Used mistreated kegs, I have experienced it and what a bitch it can be. My success has came from using 2% Acid blend(I use bsr10w from wesmar) with Hot(160F+) water. Usually you can get 2 or 3 cleaned then you have to refresh your acid/water solution. In some cases a pressure washer may help but with bung sided kegs that may be tough. You may need to replace those narly dip tubes if they are looking dirty, not sure the best way to do that but good luck.

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