Fruit flies

[Even]

Hello Pro Brewers.
I've got a big fruit fly problem in the brewery side of my brewpub. Should I call in a professional extermination service, or is there something that I can do to eradicate the pests?

Fogging?

I'd appreciate any experiences or advice you can convey.

[jrdamas]

You need to keep the larva from hatching in the drains/wet areas. Use bio-gel in the drains and let it sit overnight. Also, anything with sugar in it must be cleaned up. We use a pro service to manage pest control for us and havent seen a bug since we opened. Its cheap (like $25/week or something) and they do a great job with weekly inspections/drain cleaning and perimeter spraying inside and out of the building. Also, be sure to empty all trash containers at the end of every night and make sure your cleaning service is doing a good job cleaning up the floors in the restaurant and the brewery. You might want to stick around at the end of the night and watch over the cleaning crew to make sure they are doing their job properly. My advice is to contact a pro and have them deal with the problem so you dont even have to worry about it.

[Diamond Knot]

Cheap Solution

Along with all the forementioned cleaning requirements............

We actually made vinegar traps from mason jars, malt vinegar, and paper funnel cones (we made them from paper). The opening hole is about .15" or so.

These flies LOVE that vinegar, and once they're in the trap, they generally end up in the vinegar. When you change a trap, there's hundreds in there. We get them flying around because of our kreausen blow-off into 5 gallon buckets at our first Brewery.

[Even]

Well, I've been using vinegar traps for a while and they seemed to be working fine. Now, they're hardly catching anything, and the place is loaded.

I'll give the drain a good look and scrub with boiling water if only to kill off what's ready to hatch, until I can get the food source out of there with the bio-gel.

Thanks for the recco on the service, and on what to expect for price. I'll probably go that route, but just need to do some triage first.

Any other tips?

[rudge75]

Try picking a time when it's quiet to spray a bit of Konk around. I used to have a auto-dispenser in a dirty bottle room where the dreaded Corona and requisite lime bottles came to rest. It was just up the hall from the fermentation room. You could probably get it from Sysco, or a pest control place and a little bit goes a long way.

http://www.pestproducts.com/meteredflyspray.htm

[Moonlight]

Boring old cheap fly strips work amazingly well. For twisted satisfaction, chase the buggers with a propane torch!

[jrdamas]

traps may work great to temporarily elliminate the problem but they do not get to the root of the cause. You need to clean their food source away and kill the larva. Fruit flys have a 14 day incubation period so you might use traps to stop the problem but then 2 weeks later it is back and then a cycle begins. Use both cleaning/traps to get rid of the bugs.

[ATB Consulting]

Another thing to check would be any food that is being brought into the brewery. I worked in a brewery where the source of fruit flies was replenished by the fruit in employee lunches (sitting in lockers). This was mainly a problem when the weather was warmer.

Quaternary sanitizer is also helpful in the elimination of fruit flies. IMHO spraying the drains with quaternary sanitizer has been extremely beneficial between drain and floor scrubbings (works well in the bar area as well).

Aaron

[Even]

I'm completely sold on the concept of cleaning AND trapping methods (thanks folks!) - gotta get the food source outa there, so I'm all over that... little damp cracks like expansion joints on the floor, floor drain pans - all just got a good scrubbing out and a good rinse with boiling water to cook up any of the buggers that the brush could not get to.

So, I'll pick up some Konk, and sounds like Bio Gel is the way to go for food source removal in the drains.

For more visceral satisfaction, I've been opting for the shop-vac approach. Perhaps not as gloriously gruesome as the torch, but quite effective for clear-cutting a dense crop.

So, pardon my ignorance, but what is "Quaternary sanitizer"? (At first read, I thought you meant to do it 4 times a year!) Maybe something I've got lying around here?

[ATB Consulting]

Quaternary sanitizer is used by food plants for its antimicrobial properties. Check out the this link for more detailed information on it (you'll have to scroll down once you get there):
http://seafood.ucdavis.edu/pubs/sanitize.htm

At the bottom of the page you'll find a chart listing the properties of various sanitizers.

Aaron

[Dabruguy]

we use a similar trap with the funnel, as the little devils can't fly straight up,,,, but use fruit, bananas, peaches, etc,,, sweet stuff, havne't tried vinegar tho,,, do you use cider or regular?.....dt deja brew in shrewsbury mass

[Moonlight]

Quat is available from Grainter, too.

[dumbagain]

keep all areas as clean as possible
they need food, water, and a place to breed

we had a pro come in and right away he located a crack in the floor back near a keg washing / sink area. they had all they needed there, so we caulked up the crack and it seemed to help.

once you eliminate a possible breeding area, you should see a decrease in flies in about 5-7 days.

[David Meadows]

Flies

I once killed off an infestation of moths that came into the brewery from a malt shipment from Tomas Fawcett in the UK. I sealed off the malt storage room and released carbon dioxide into the room. I even used dry ice in some malt bags, Killed them all, even the eggs.
This method will work on flies too I believe but then you must be able to seal off the brewery so as little air as possible gets in.
David Meadows

[Natrat]

fruit fly eggs

Remember that the little bastards are attracted to CO2 in low concentrations. Look for areas of CO2 leakage and\or sugars and starches. We used trapping for a long time, but what really cut the buggers out was finding out what fruit fly eggs look like...they are little brown spots, specks really. The only thing that really gets em off is chlorinated caustic solution. But once we got all the surfaces clean (walls, stand up fridges, picture frames, display mugs, etc) they actually disappeared...we had zero fruit flies during a year that was famous for dense ff infestations!

cheers