Gimme Steam!

[Bainbridge]

Anybody using a portable steam generator out there?

We've been borrowing a proverbial cup of steam from our neighboring distillery to clean our barrels and I couldn't be happier with how well it works. But we do end up inconveniencing them, and we are beholden to their schedule. So as we start doing more barrel stuff I am contemplating solutions. Since we have a direct fire brewhouse, we don't have a boiler of our own to run a cleaning wand off of, so I've been looking at portable steam generators. Anybody using one, something on the order of say, this? But since I don't really want to spend $10k (and I could get an ozone generator for that too) anybody rigged up a cheap and cheerful solution?

Fun Fact: the music video for Peter Gabriel's 'Steam' won two MTV video awards in 1993. Go watch it, and contemplate the March of Progress.

[dick murton]

The first question has to be - are you trying to use steam to clean them, and simply using steam to reduce the cleaning time / improve efficiency, or are you trying to steam sterilise (kegs). The type you have there should be OK for cleaning, but I would be wary of using direct steam jets from this sort of machine for wooden containers as over a period of use, it will soften the wood and strip the surface off. However, if you are using steam for sterilisation of steel kegs, then you need a different sort of generator which creates (x) pounds / kg per hour at a specified temperature, so you can sterilise with wet steam at greater than 100 C to minimise the hold time. When I was looking for this sort of steam generator a couple of months ago, I found some US sourced ones, which I couldn't use because they were not CE marked (mind you - the rest of the kit should never have been CE marked - horribly unsafe) but sensibly, the US suppliers refused to supply me. Sorry, but I didn't make a note of the suppliers name. I have kept a note of a supplier in Italy, which might be useful as a reference. www.pony-Italy.com

If you have water with a lot of carbonate / bicarbonate in, it will probably be worth softening it first to prevent scale build up - whichever sort of unit you end up going for.

[Bainbridge]

Yeah it's more like Job 1: Clean and Sani Barrels. Job 2: whatever else we can get it to do. Like steam clean our trench drains, cold room, brewdeck etc. Our current keg washer handles the kegs just fine, though a steam hit to the outside occasionally might be nice. I figured I'd get one of the steam wand attachments that fits in the barrel bung, so it's not like pressure washing the inside.

[TGTimm]

Russel--I so do not want to even contemplate writing the JHA for a hand-held steam wand! For general clean-up and water saving, I'd look into an electric cold- or warm-water power-washer instead. For the barrel cleaning, a dedicated station with a fixed steam nozzle and some sort of safety switch to prevent the steam from flowing unless a barrel is present would make more sense to me.

Sorry if I sound a little paranoid, but I've spent most of the last month writing OSHA documents for the brewery....