Taking Care Of Your Home Brewing Equipment

If you are shopping around any internet site or catalog because
you're in the market for some home brewing equipment, you may
notice a lot of very large and pointed ads that strongly encourage
you to buy their sanitizers and sanitizing products.

Your first thought might be that this is just a waste of time; you can just
wash your own fermenting containers, airlocks, and boiling pots at home (or better yet, have your spouse do it!) with regular dish soap. After all, if that bottle of Palmolive is good enough for your plates and glasses, it should be good enough for your home brewing equipment, right?

Actually, there's a reason why those sanitizers are advertised right along with your equipment, and a reason why you should be using those products instead of your regular dish soap.

Home brewing equipment is not like any other set of dishes or
cookware in your home. It's highly unlikely that you have active
cultures and live microbial elements in your other dishes; most of
the food that you eat is dead and cooked. When you add yeast to
your mixture, that yeast reacts with the sugar in your wort, which
is what eventually turns to alcohol. However, any residual amounts
of yeast and sugar left over in your home brewing equipment will
continue to react with each other, even if you can't see that going
on with the naked eye.

Allowing these microbial elements to flourish without getting rid
of them is definitely going to affect all of your later batches of
beer, and may even introduce harmful bacteria that can make you
sick, if they're not taken care of properly. Most manufacturers of
home brewing equipment recommend that you do indeed wash the
equipment with hot water or with dish soap, but that you then
sanitize everything right after. This sanitizing step does more
than just remove surface dirt, which is all that washing and
rinsing is going to do for your home brewing equipment. Rather, it
removes all traces and elements of your previous batches and
doesn't allow them to continue to flourish.

Remember that brewing is a chemical process and that yeast is an
active culture, not something dead like meat or eggs. You can wash
your regular dinner dishes in hot water and soap and be assured
that everything is properly cleaned, but your home brewing
equipment is more like lab equipment than dinner dishes. It needs
to have all traces of your "experiments" or brewing processes
removed in order to be ready for your next batch.

So don't hesitate when you see those advertisements for sanitizers
made especially for home brewing equipment. The manufacturers
aren't encouraging you to buy them just so that they'll make more
money; they know that this is a very important step in having a
successful brewing process. They are usually very affordable
anyway, so you should definitely consider using them in order to
properly care for and maintain your own home brewing equipment.

If you want to try home brewing and have your friends in awe, grab a copy of Better Your Brewing:
http://www.BetterYourBrewing.com