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Keg Cleaning - Or, "How Not to Kill Ourselves"

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  • Keg Cleaning - Or, "How Not to Kill Ourselves"

    Gents –

    I was provided an old (late 90s) Specific Mechanical 3-head automatic Keg Cleaner by our guys in Jackson, but I don’t have three phase power and am looking at options to get it running on single phase. I'm fairly mechanical but sparky stuff scares me.

    Until then I needed to find some other way of cleaning kegs and it finally dawned on me that I can still use the keg cleaner caustic reservoir and keg connections and just substitute my pump. Dad and I hooked it up tonight and did a wet run with water before we did hot caustic. Since I’ve never done this I’d like to sanity check some things and ask some questions.... and hopefully minimize any drama.

    Is this the correct sequence for a new keg?
    1. Caustic Wash (I have PBW... need to confirm if it works in a CO2 environment). Suggestions on temperature? I get mixed messages looking through the FiveStar documentation.
    2. Blow out w/compressed air.
    3. Rinse.
    4. Blow out with compressed air.
    5. Sanitize.
    6. Blow with CO2.
    7. Fill with CO2.

    Other Questions -
    • Any guess how I know that the pump speed is correct? Basically I adjusted mine (1.5 hp w/VFD) until the reservoir level wasn’t changing, but I've seen threads on here mention that filling up the kegs during the wash cycle isn't a bad thing.
    • If I vent the caustic tank to atmosphere, do I still run any kind of risk of blowing up a keg? The tank is well vented, but I have no pressure gauges in the system. I've bypassed all valves, etc.
    • When I’m blowing them out with compressed air and CO2, what is a safe pressure? I’m seeing 30 – 40 PSI for blowing it out poking around the interwebs...
    • Any guess on the length of the wash, rinse, and sanitize cycles?

    Finally, do I need to passivate new kegs with acid? Please say no….

    Thanks guys, sorry for the stupid questions. I just don't want to blow anything up.

    Justin
    Justin Smith

    President & Business Development
    Ten Sleep Brewing Co., Inc.
    2549B Highway 16
    PO Box 406
    Ten Sleep, WY 82442
    tensleepbrewing@gmail.com
    www.tensleepbrewingco.com
    www.facebook.com/TSBCo

  • #2
    When you first place a dirty keg on the washer it will still have pressure in it so the first step should be to drain the pressure and any left over beer/sludge. The next step should be a water rinse so as to reduce the load on your caustic, then a caustic wash. We have a pressure gauge on our manual washer and have 2 regulators on co2 and air for redundancy, we have them set at 40 psi. We wash and sani for 40 seconds. The rest of the steps look to be correct. As far as passivation that depends on wether the manufacturer did it for you or not. A high quality (expensive) keg brand new from a manufacturer like Franke arrive passivated and ready to go. We run a cycle anyway to be sure. YMMV.
    Last edited by Luch15; 10-19-2013, 06:27 AM.
    Luch Scremin
    Engine 15 Brewing Co.
    luch at engine15 dot com

    Comment


    • #3
      Thanks a bunch for the sanity check Luch. Yeah these are all new kegs so I wasn't too worried about blowing the old stuff out. Will certainly do that in the future. I hope they're passivated....
      Justin Smith

      President & Business Development
      Ten Sleep Brewing Co., Inc.
      2549B Highway 16
      PO Box 406
      Ten Sleep, WY 82442
      tensleepbrewing@gmail.com
      www.tensleepbrewingco.com
      www.facebook.com/TSBCo

      Comment

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