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IDD Squire 2 Plus Issues - Not purging correctly - I'm pulling my hair out.

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  • IDD Squire 2 Plus Issues - Not purging correctly - I'm pulling my hair out.

    Hello, I'm the new head brewer at a longstanding brewpub with a lot of ooooold and semi-neglected equipment. I've noticed a lot of oxidation on all of our kegged beers. Beer tastes great out of the BBT, then kegged on our IDD Squire 2, put in our cooler (which struggles to maintain anything lower than 42F) for two weeks, bam, we lose the nice bright hop character and get that weird chewy (in a bad way), slightly harsh, oxidized malt character. I've been on the phone twice with IDD and have tried their solution to no avail. We've been checking the gas coming out of the kegs with a borrowed Beverly DO meter and in our washed kegs, the gas coming out is about 2200 ppb O2. Our packaged beer is (packaged into those 2200ppb kegs) between 115-150ppb - wayyyy too high for a keg. So, I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience with this issue on an IDD filler, or if you have any idea of what the O2 concentration coming out of your clean kegs is. Thanks in advance.

  • #2
    Some details and/or pictures of how the Squire is plumbed would help, especially air and CO2 lines.
    Timm Turrentine

    Brewerywright,
    Terminal Gravity Brewing,
    Enterprise. Oregon.

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    • #3
      Thanks for the response. Everything is plumbed correctly and all inlet pressures are at the manual-recommended settings (see pic). The IDD engineers said the one thing we may not be doing right was having a long (over 8 feet) 1.5" drain tube connected to the wash drain, as that could create backpressure and not allow the keg to purge correctly. We switched that out for a very loose fitting and short 3" PVC pipe, but still same results. We've been using the thing for years without issue and all of a sudden we started noticing oxidation in our kegged beers, starting in december. We've tracked down the biggest DO pickup to the IDD.

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      • #4
        I'm very curious if folks have some Oxygen readings (in ppb) of the gas in their kegs after an IDD was cycle? I checked ours with a Beverly DO meter and our kegs' gas was in the 2200ppb range.

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        • #5
          We've been using the IDD Squire II for about three years--we were one of the first purchasers of this machine. We've never had a complaint about oxidation, nor seen any sign of it.

          If the problem is new, the first thing to ask is "What has changed?" Something is different than before, so find that and fix it. Time your cycles to be sure the purge is long enough. Check your CO2 source for O2--this can happen. Make sure all seals are good, and that your CO2 system is actually capable of proving enough gas to do the job--if you are using 50 lb tanks without a surge tank and/or vaporizer, you're almost certainly not supplying the big burst of gas this machine needs.
          Timm Turrentine

          Brewerywright,
          Terminal Gravity Brewing,
          Enterprise. Oregon.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Ajchocholousek View Post
            Hello, I'm the new head brewer at a longstanding brewpub with a lot of ooooold and semi-neglected equipment. I've noticed a lot of oxidation on all of our kegged beers. Beer tastes great out of the BBT, then kegged on our IDD Squire 2, put in our cooler (which struggles to maintain anything lower than 42F) for two weeks, bam, we lose the nice bright hop character and get that weird chewy (in a bad way), slightly harsh, oxidized malt character. I've been on the phone twice with IDD and have tried their solution to no avail. We've been checking the gas coming out of the kegs with a borrowed Beverly DO meter and in our washed kegs, the gas coming out is about 2200 ppb O2. Our packaged beer is (packaged into those 2200ppb kegs) between 115-150ppb - wayyyy too high for a keg. So, I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience with this issue on an IDD filler, or if you have any idea of what the O2 concentration coming out of your clean kegs is. Thanks in advance.
            Have you found a solution to this? We are expericing similar troubles with oxygen pickup on IDD squire 2.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by zymologistchris View Post
              Have you found a solution to this? We are expericing similar troubles with oxygen pickup on IDD squire 2.
              Yeah, I found out that the Squire 2 just simply does not have a long enough CO2 purge cycle to get the job done. You can call IDD and they'll say they can send engineers to reprogram it, but there's a ceiling on how long they can program it and it seems that the machine just simply wasn't designed with a long enough CO2 purge like their better machines. Plus the cost of travel and pay for an engineer to come out just doesn't make sense to us.

              We switched to using N2 as our purge gas instead of compressed air from our air compressor. I got this idea from a semi-recent MBAA email forum talking about O2 in the keg environment. I'll post it below on a new post. The first post is from someone discussing this very issue; the second is from IDD in response.

              We use a 500lb. N2 cylinder and, on sequence 1, that'll get us 60-65 clean kegs. When the cylinder gets low, however, we usually switch to a fresh one and put the partial on to our tap system. It seems like when the cylinder gets low, it doesn't purge quite as well and will leave liquid in the keg more frequently.

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              • #8
                This is a reply on the MBAA email forum to someone who asked about O2 in the keg environment.

                Hi all,

                One can get very close to zero ppb oxygen in kegs if cleaning them properly.
                There is a major problem in this industry: a very huge number of brewers
                with little experience/schooling trusting that equipment manufacturers
                actually know what they're doing. Keg washers are a great example of this.

                The programmed cleaning and purge cycles used on low-end keg washers that
                I've seen are far too short to actually get kegs clean. These cycles seem to
                be based on those used by very large breweries making low-protein, high
                adjunct, highly-filtered beer. Such beer isn't nearly as dirty as most craft
                beer and presents less of a cleaning challenge.

                As far as oxygen pick-up goes, CO2 purging is grossly inefficient. The best
                thing to do is to not introduce air into your kegs in the first place.
                Rather than using compressed air to purge kegs, use nitrogen. You can get
                dewars of N2 from your gas supplier. It will add about 17 cents to the cost
                of cleaning each keg and you will have virtually no oxygen in your kegs (we
                check keg atmospheres with our Cbox and yes, I really did the math on the
                cost).

                This serves another very important purpose: it keeps petroleum out of your
                kegs. I've yet to see a small brewery with an oil-free air compressor
                (probably because they are very expensive). I have also never found an oil
                filter that really gets all the oil out of the compressed air. Using
                nitrogen rather than compressed air will prevent adulteration of your beer.

                If your machine is set up in a flexible manner, you may find that you can
                run the solenoids using compressed air while using N2 only for the gas that
                is going into the kegs. This will save a bit of N2.

                Hope that helps,

                George de Piro
                Chief Brewing Officer
                Druthers Brewing Company

                1053 Broadway
                Albany, NY 12204
                (518) 650-7996

                Comment


                • #9
                  And here is the response from IDD:

                  Hi George - We at IDD do understand what is required when it comes to Sankey keg system washing, sterilizing and cleaning. Unfortunately, many craft brewers still don't see the value in the package that moves the highest volume of their product to market. Higher priced, quality keg processing equipment and the correct services to operate them simply resolves these issues. Low budget systems do have constraints - including our Squire and Mini King series that run sanitizing sequences. The question of DO2 in beer in keg is an issue with sanitizing systems over those systems using steam sterilizing. When we designed the first commercial sanitizer system for the North American craft brewers back in the early 1980's, no craft brewers had steam and the few that did operated on a 10 and 15 PSIG supply. Steam sterilizing keg systems using 40 PSIG steam will not have a DO2 problem because the steam at that pressure not only purges out the final rinse water but by it's very composition is DO free and consequently is easy to deal with. When it came to doing a sanitizing sequence, the amount of CO2 at 30 PSIG dynamic pressure (when CO2 is flowing through the keg), will take as much as 6 to 8 times the kegs volume to bring the DO down to below 100 PPB. Your N2 solution is a good solution and a lesser cost method of purging the keg now that moderately priced N2 membrane generators or portable bulk tank systems are readily available. It is possible on our budget fillers to slow down the fill at the beginning of the fill sequence for the first 4 to 5 seconds when turbulence entrains residual O2 into the beer.
                  If anyone has any questions or needs assistance, please contact me directly.
                  Cheers,

                  Jeff Gunn
                  President & CEO
                  IDD Process & Packaging, Inc.
                  5450 Tech Circle
                  Moorpark, CA 93021
                  Toll Free: 800-621-4144
                  Tel: 805-529-9890
                  Fax: 805-529-9282
                  Cell: 805-444-3842
                  Web Site: www.iddeas.com

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                  • #10
                    See if you still have oil separator or filters in line from the compressed air. Failed filter/drier created that problem for us.
                    Also, try adding a water pressure gauge, as when others use water in the building, we find it diminishes the water pressure and caused rinsing issues. The old IDD machines had a separate water/sanitizer pump, the newer ones rely on mains pressure.

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