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Nitro tap: Remove spout or leave in place end of day?

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  • Nitro tap: Remove spout or leave in place end of day?

    We have one nitro tap in our taproom. All taps are broken down and cleaned every 2 weeks. For end-of-day cleaning, we spray a little bit of star san up into our faucets to flush out any remaining beer. We then plug each one with a plug brush, which spent the day soaking in star san.

    Now, should we also remove the nitro tap's spout at the end of the day? My inclination is to leave it in place then rinse-and-plug like the other taps. One of our bartenders removes the spout and puts the plug in the faucet housing instead, which strikes me as worse than leaving the spout on.

    Sent from my SM-G935T using Tapatalk

  • #2
    Take the nitro tap spout and the little sparkler disk out each night, and soak them in a pint of water. If you leave them in place, the sparkler disk will get gummed up with dried beer and not work properly.
    Linus Hall
    Yazoo Brewing
    Nashville, TN
    www.yazoobrew.com

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    • #3
      I attended a couple of sessions last night, one of which was talking about dispense hygiene. You should be rinsing the fittings and wiping down the dispense tube, and then soaking the sparkler in dilute sterilant solution, potassium or sodium metabisulphite are ideal - but PAA should be fine as well. Otherwise, all that happens is that the bugs, and there will be plenty, continue to grow overnight and infect the beer the following day. The bugs gradually make their way back down the pipes and so adversely affect at least some of the beer in the pipe and dispense head. If you have a slow period, then quite a bit of beer can become adversely affected.

      Oh yes, and the guys reckoned there was a big improvement in quality cleaning weekly rather than every two weeks.
      dick

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      • #4
        I did find Linus's answer unsatisfying. Sure, it would keep the sparkler from gumming up with beer, but it's unhygienic as all get out. The Institute of Brewing and Distilling published a research paper on faucet hygiene and its author found that the old British method of soaking overnight in soda water did nothing to limit contamination. https://doi.org/10.1002/jib.335

        I'll stick with my protocol for now, though the idea of soaking the sparkler (or the entire spout) in sanitizer overnight has some appeal. The biggest problem is getting the bartenders to stick with it.

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