Tips for Easy Cleaning and Sanitizing

Jasper's recommends the following products for cleaning and sanitizing:

C-Brite Sanitizer / Cleanser

A powerful brewery-grade cleanser & sanitizer used to disinfect your equipment. Preventing bacteria and wild yeast from getting in your beer is important. They can't harm you, but they can leave unpleasant flavors in your beer.

Clean and sanitize your equipment using C-Brite. For effective sanitation, you should fill the carboys and the bottling bucket to the top. If your equipment is already clean, C-Brite only needs 1 minute of contact time to sanitize. If your equipment is not already clean (free of any gunk, stains or residue), allow the C-Brite to soak for 1 hour or more until clean.

Rinse well with water. From now on, everything that comes in contact with your beer must be sanitized by soaking in C-Brite. This is very important. In fact, it's one of the secrets to making good beer.

B-Brite Cleanser

A powerful brewery-grade cleanser used to thoroughly clean your brewing equipment. Use B-Brite for the tough cleaning jobs. B-Brite is a more powerful cleaner than C-Brite, so when equipment is dirty, we recommend giving it an overnight soaking in B-Brite.

Other sanitizing tips: 

To produce the best tasting beer, anything that touches the beer should be properly cleaned and sanitized. A good rule when brewing is to not let anything that has directly touched your hands touch the beer. After all, your hands cannot truly be sanitized. When using siphoning equipment, for example, handle the equipment in places that won't touch the beer.

How do you know if your equipment is clean? "Clean" means free of any deposits, gunk or stains. Equipment cannot be sanitized unless it is already clean. "Sanitized" means 99.99% of bacteria and wild yeasts are dead. Sanitized is not the same as sterilized. You can only sterilize with an autoclave, so just keep things clean and sanitized, and you will produce consistently good beer.

When done brewing, it is good practice to always put away your equipment clean and dry. At Jasper's, we like to make time do the work for us. Therefore, after you are finished using your equipment and you know it is dirty, soak the equipment overnight or longer in B-Brite.  Why not?  After all, you just finished using the equipment, so you don't need to use it right away.  After the equipment is clean, rinse well with water and allow the equipment to thoroughly dry.  Do not store equipment wet.  It will become mildewy.  When you want to use the equipment, you only have to give it a 1 minute soak with C-Brite.

To clean and sanitize long equipment, such as the automatic siphon, we recommend buying a plastic wallpaper bin from a hardware store. Such bins are long and narrow and usually hold less than 2 gallons, thus conserving C-Brite - and you can completely submerge your equipment in such a bin.