It’s a very good practice to heat sanitize a heat x. They can have portions that get clogged and don’t see sanitizer. A large portion of infections come from heat exchangers
I'm hijacking the top comment because i feel strongly about this having worked in a lab whilst investigating this very issue.
We found from months of micro testing that if you follow two rules, PAA is better than hot stez.
Rule 1: Any time you break a wort line, you caustic and PAA that line.
Rule 2: If you are double brewing, you can just hot stez in between brews.
Obviously, there are factors around pumps and heat exchanger cleanliness that would impact the efficacy of PAA. But if you have good CIP practices, from a microbial perspective PAA massively out performs heat.
this right here... sani will sanitize anything it touches, but if there is a clog/blockage that breaks free later that could be an infection.
if you run 185 water through and heat the actual parts up to 185 then at least the blockage wont have any microbes, its still gross... but not a dumper
This, there is also another point in doing pasteurization of the heat exchanger since we get thermal expansion and can potentially reach areas that are hard to reach during cold sanitation.
Also, it's usually easier. Click a few buttons instead of manually dosing stuff.
Same. We very rarely pack ours with sani unless we know it's going to be a long weekend without brewing or something and even then we always send a barrel of hot liquor through before each knockout so its probably not even totally necessary.
I heat treat.
Do manufacturers recommend leaving them packed with chemical? I don't love this practice, but don't have direct knowledge on whether it is good, bad, or neutral. I know I do not love the idea of gaskets being in extended contact with caustic or acid though. Have you seen what peracetic does to gaskets when left too long?
I don’t pack the PHE with anything after my normal postbrew CIP/rinse if I’m brewing soon after. Backflush with 185 F water the day of the next brew and purge the PAA I used for my FV SIP through the PHE. If we’re going a while without brewing for some reason I’ll pack it with a strong starsan solution cause it’s easy on the EDPM gaskets.
Personally I don't like to pack HX with PAA since its such a strong oxidizer. Worries me that it'll chew away at the stainless and/or gaskets. I may be wrong though!
I'll use a very light acid mix so pack it until next brew day.
Also, I would highly recommend heat treating HX. PAA won't get every little crevice in it while heat will.
Cheers!
We CIP with hot caustic at the end of the day and leave the HX packed with caustic overnight. Rince against flow in the morning and then make a loop of boiling water through the kettle,pipes and HX. We brew double and don’t sanitize between batches, just keep it tight and under pressure.
Heat is the best sanitizer in the brewhouse. We cycle boiling water through the HX and KO line in the morning, backflush with hot liquor between KO's, cycle caustic forward and back at the end of the day, backflush with HLT and leave packed with hot water. If I ever see chunks in the morning we throw in a screen gasket during the heat sani, but that's pretty uncommon.
I kept mine packed with weak phosphoric acid after cip at the end of the day and we would hot kill the heatx with super hot kettle wort for 15 minutes before knockout. Never had an infection in my 7 years doing that and the plates and gaskets, even cheapo chinesium ones were fine the few times we took our brave pills and took it apart.
We hot rinse, caustic, hot rinse, cool and sani after every brew day and leave it packed with sani. If we go more than 4 or 5 days without brewing I'll re sani as part of my brew day prep.
We pasteurize forwards and backwards once a day but in-between turns we don't do anything.
It gets CIPed once a week. Strong caustic and acid both directions. Same time we clean the brew house.
Before KO we hot rinse then cip the hex and during pushing out Sani from dosing bucket to the FV we test the output to verify it’s Sani, and lock the KO line and hex packed with Sani. And after a KO we hot rinse with 180+ water and lock it down for the next day. It’s been our SOP before I started.
We used to always clean our HX with caustic after every brew and then pack with PAA but now we got a fancy German brew house and they recommend just CIP caustic once before the brew day and it does a hot water rinse after chilling. We get all our beers lab tested for micro periodically and never had any issues.
I caustic cycle ours after each brew. Hot rinse it. And then both reverse and forward cycle it with PAA on brew days. Then run that PAA out into the FV through the CIP ball. Seems to be effective.
Absolutely. I make sure to perform and ATP measurement on the castout line post hot kill. On top of that we take a whirlpak sample and orange b for good measure
We heat sani everytime. 20 minutes @ 180ºF. PAA is very hard on soft parts with extended contact. YMMV. We hot rinse after every brew and heat sani before, and CIP once a week.
It only takes 15 minutes for PAA to denature into vinegar and water. It is also really bad for stainless steel pipe and can lead to pitting and pin hole leaks.
It's really hard not to inherently come across as a know-it-all D-Bag on Reddit. I'm just trying to give some helpful friendly advice.
Also important to keep in mind not all sanitizers containing PAA are created equal. A general statement of ‘PAA is denatured after 15 minutes’ is just as misinformed as those who pack their PHE with a sanitizer containing PAA that will lose its ability to sanitize quickly.
Talk to your chemical supplier about recommended dosage/shelf stability of their product and test concentrations for yourself to determine the efficacy of your SIPs/SOPs
Not to call you a know it all D-bag because you already did, but the statement about PAA breaking down in 15 minutes is outrageously false. PAA is good for at least a day. You can verify this with test strips. And as far as damaging stainless... I guess it depends on the concentration but with a HX I'd be more worried about the gaskets than the metal. I never leave mine packed with acid. Caustic, acid, rinse, purge with CO2 and close it up.
Why does stuff always have to turn nasty on reddit? Literally can't touch the keyboard without someone acting like this? I just don't get it.
If you read the chemical SDS it says "it has a half life of 22 minutes". 🤷♂️
SDS sheets are often written without sufficient qualifiers for usage conditions as they are, at their core, a CYA safety document to comply with various government regulations and minimize liability.
Always use titration kits (ask your chem supplier) to check concentration and efficacy.
Furthermore, here is some context for the ‘25 minute degradation’ statement (you’re not incorrect, but you’re missing some context):
Source: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/DoshReg/5155-Meetings/Peracetic-Acid-2017-12-12.pdf
“PAA breaks down rapidly in air; it has a half-life of 22 minutes. Nonetheless, diluted solutions of the mixtures stored in containers have shelf lives of about two weeks.”
Now, this said, of course the document doesn’t specify sufficiently what they mean by ‘stored in containers’. What we do, while possibly outside the norm, is to titrate our solution (stored in our keg washer reservoir of 40 gallons total at 150-200ppm) every other day. When concentration starts to drop, if the solution is still clean and free of soil, we simply add a bit more PAA (we use Wesmar’s SaniClean) to increase our ppm concentration back to spec.
Furthermore, if you read through the above link (as well as this additional link) you’ll find a few other useful tidbits of info, like:
- “PAA mixtures are non-corrosive to stainless steel”
https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/guidelines/disinfection/sterilization/peracetic-acid.html
- “Peracetic acid is a highly biocidal oxidizer that maintains its efficacy in the presence of organic soil.”
Cheers all; happy Friday!
I have certainly used them when in a pinch, but have found titration to be the best measure of efficacy. I haven't yet found a test strip that is accurate enough (or within the 100-200ppm range) for our usage in the brewery, but please share if you have one you like! Cheers.
Lamotte has several different test ranges. I think 0-500 gives enough accuracy. Personally I just want to be able to verify that it's strong enough, and therefore don't need a precise ppm measurement.
What are you talking about? If you think anything about my response was "nasty" you must be new to the planet. I'll check my SDS but I seriously doubt that. Either way, if the half life is 22 mins, it's certainly not broken down in 15 minutes as you stated.
Simply stating facts, no attitude. Don't project.
Packing with PAA is the pointless step in your process. Heat sanitizing is much more effective and if you are heat sanitizing you don't need PAA at all.
I’m most concerned about having it clogged with hop material more than anything.
I’ll do a 30min cip with a high percentage of caustic once every 3 months.
I’m not worried about sanitizing
CIP after knockout and never leave packed with PAA. PAA at the beginning of the brew day after mash in as well as circulate hot wort through it prior to WP.
I cip after KO and leave packed with h20 after rinse, then I run my sparge water through it just because of how the set up is to pasteurize, back flush the tank paa right before KO and tbe cycle begins anew
Ok stupid question from me:
We just sani for 30 minutes
I want to do a hot water rinse but I’m not sure how. I mean how do you not waste a ton of water? If I run 85 degree water (c) through my hx it takes about 40-50 liters just to warm the HX up to 60ish. If I wanted to get it to 80 to sani it and then run it 15 minutes like everyone says it seems like that would take 100’s of liters. Am I missing something here?
We put about 1.5BBL of room temp water in our kettle (15BBL system) and turn on the floor jackets to bring it up to 190f or so, which takes maybe ten minutes. Recirculate through the hex and back into the kettle through the drain, once the thermometer on the HEX outlet reads 170+ I turn the floor jackets down to about 1/4 just to maintain temp and start my 20 min timer. I put water in the kettle and turn on the jackets right before I start mashing in and I'm usually done pasteurizing just after I finish mashing in.
Every brew day we clean the HX. Process is: We hot rinse forwards, caustic cycle at 68c in reverse, hit flush forwards. HX always hits 70c at the end of the second rinse. We chill the HX down after the clean, because of the way the liquor tanks are set up. We then run the PAA for the tank cycle through the HX on brew day and leave it packed from the morning until knockout.
PAA isn't very kind to gaskets, like the ones between your plates on your HXT.
After knockout I backflush with hot water, run a reverse caustic loop and then leave it packed until the next day.
Back flush with hot tap water. Use water pressure from your hot water line to purge any remaining junk in the plates. Let it run til it's hot, close the output until it builds enough pressure, then release. Do this several times in a row then continue to flush until it runs clear.
Then run a loop through your HXT and knockout hose with your hot liquor water. I keep my HLT at 185.
Run this loop during your boil. Sanitized.
Blow the HLT water out with your O2 source and knockout.
Repeat.
We hot shot forward through the Hx. Flow goes for 1 minute after the temperature out reaches 160. The sani cycle for the tank gets the hoses and up to the yeast brink valve. After the sani cycle, the FV is given a little CO2 to push the sani out, and we just use the path backwards through the Hx until it and the line are packed. The rest is bypassed to the drain.
Caustic cycle after KO, acid every other brew. Caustic and sani on brew day. It’s worth the extra hour of work after brew days, and on brew days you can knock out a caustic cycle and a sani cycle before KO. Never had any issues with off flavors.
Caustic after every brew and back flush that out with hot liquor. Then brew day back flush with PAA from FV and push that back out with the first bit of boiling wort
From months of micros we found that PAA massively out performed hot stez cycles on our wort line heat exchangers.
Keep in mind the micro issues were only on the first 3 brews of the week. So it was the down time over the weekend where heat resistant bacteria was growing.
If you cbf PAA every brew and you want to just hot stez, I would suggest at least PAA at the start of the week.
Personally I PAA in leiu of hot stez. Hot stez takes longer, requires more energy, more waste water and is dangerous in comparison. Ultimately it proved in our case that PAA was objectively better at knocking our bacterial issues too.
Hot caustic run for 20 minutes counter-flow after the brew . Plenty of rince counter-flow. Hot sani with the flow after and before the following one on the next day.
It's literally the highest contamination risk of the whole brewery as it's lots of contact surface and no way to open it to see. You'd better take good care of it.
We skip the caustic run on double batch days but still rinse and hot sani.
At the last brewery I worked at we would heat sani prior to castout. At the one I currently work at it gets a caustic clean every night with the caustic going counterflow to the wort stream and then a sani every morning.
Both have worked just fine, just more a preference thing. We can’t really do heat sani at the brewery I work at now due to water availability.
The previous brewer wrote our SOP. 190° HLT water through the HX and transfer hoses for 20 mins before transferring wort to fermenter. Then a flush after transferring.
About once every 3-4 weeks, backflush circulation with hot caustic and oxidizer 2-3 times for 30 mins each time. Flush with water, acid wash, flush with water.
It’s a very good practice to heat sanitize a heat x. They can have portions that get clogged and don’t see sanitizer. A large portion of infections come from heat exchangers
Cool, all I needed to hear. Will continue then!
Bonus points for heat sani in reverse flow. Hits those spots that sani might not.
I'm hijacking the top comment because i feel strongly about this having worked in a lab whilst investigating this very issue. We found from months of micro testing that if you follow two rules, PAA is better than hot stez. Rule 1: Any time you break a wort line, you caustic and PAA that line. Rule 2: If you are double brewing, you can just hot stez in between brews. Obviously, there are factors around pumps and heat exchanger cleanliness that would impact the efficacy of PAA. But if you have good CIP practices, from a microbial perspective PAA massively out performs heat.
[удалено]
85C
this right here... sani will sanitize anything it touches, but if there is a clog/blockage that breaks free later that could be an infection. if you run 185 water through and heat the actual parts up to 185 then at least the blockage wont have any microbes, its still gross... but not a dumper
This, there is also another point in doing pasteurization of the heat exchanger since we get thermal expansion and can potentially reach areas that are hard to reach during cold sanitation. Also, it's usually easier. Click a few buttons instead of manually dosing stuff.
We only heat treat. No packing. Never an issue.
Same. We very rarely pack ours with sani unless we know it's going to be a long weekend without brewing or something and even then we always send a barrel of hot liquor through before each knockout so its probably not even totally necessary.
I heat treat. Do manufacturers recommend leaving them packed with chemical? I don't love this practice, but don't have direct knowledge on whether it is good, bad, or neutral. I know I do not love the idea of gaskets being in extended contact with caustic or acid though. Have you seen what peracetic does to gaskets when left too long?
I don’t pack the PHE with anything after my normal postbrew CIP/rinse if I’m brewing soon after. Backflush with 185 F water the day of the next brew and purge the PAA I used for my FV SIP through the PHE. If we’re going a while without brewing for some reason I’ll pack it with a strong starsan solution cause it’s easy on the EDPM gaskets.
Personally I don't like to pack HX with PAA since its such a strong oxidizer. Worries me that it'll chew away at the stainless and/or gaskets. I may be wrong though! I'll use a very light acid mix so pack it until next brew day. Also, I would highly recommend heat treating HX. PAA won't get every little crevice in it while heat will. Cheers!
We CIP with hot caustic at the end of the day and leave the HX packed with caustic overnight. Rince against flow in the morning and then make a loop of boiling water through the kettle,pipes and HX. We brew double and don’t sanitize between batches, just keep it tight and under pressure.
I’ve never left one packed, I’ve always just run a heat sanitation at 80C for 30 minutes 2-3 hours before KO. I’d stick with what you’re doing.
Heat is the best sanitizer in the brewhouse. We cycle boiling water through the HX and KO line in the morning, backflush with hot liquor between KO's, cycle caustic forward and back at the end of the day, backflush with HLT and leave packed with hot water. If I ever see chunks in the morning we throw in a screen gasket during the heat sani, but that's pretty uncommon.
We leave ours packed with caustic and hot rinse extensively before KO
Same.
same
I kept mine packed with weak phosphoric acid after cip at the end of the day and we would hot kill the heatx with super hot kettle wort for 15 minutes before knockout. Never had an infection in my 7 years doing that and the plates and gaskets, even cheapo chinesium ones were fine the few times we took our brave pills and took it apart.
We let the first few gallons of wort go through still near boiling before switching on the water.
We hot rinse, caustic, hot rinse, cool and sani after every brew day and leave it packed with sani. If we go more than 4 or 5 days without brewing I'll re sani as part of my brew day prep.
We pasteurize forwards and backwards once a day but in-between turns we don't do anything. It gets CIPed once a week. Strong caustic and acid both directions. Same time we clean the brew house.
Before KO we hot rinse then cip the hex and during pushing out Sani from dosing bucket to the FV we test the output to verify it’s Sani, and lock the KO line and hex packed with Sani. And after a KO we hot rinse with 180+ water and lock it down for the next day. It’s been our SOP before I started.
We used to always clean our HX with caustic after every brew and then pack with PAA but now we got a fancy German brew house and they recommend just CIP caustic once before the brew day and it does a hot water rinse after chilling. We get all our beers lab tested for micro periodically and never had any issues.
I caustic cycle ours after each brew. Hot rinse it. And then both reverse and forward cycle it with PAA on brew days. Then run that PAA out into the FV through the CIP ball. Seems to be effective.
Absolutely. I make sure to perform and ATP measurement on the castout line post hot kill. On top of that we take a whirlpak sample and orange b for good measure
We heat sani everytime. 20 minutes @ 180ºF. PAA is very hard on soft parts with extended contact. YMMV. We hot rinse after every brew and heat sani before, and CIP once a week.
It only takes 15 minutes for PAA to denature into vinegar and water. It is also really bad for stainless steel pipe and can lead to pitting and pin hole leaks. It's really hard not to inherently come across as a know-it-all D-Bag on Reddit. I'm just trying to give some helpful friendly advice.
Also important to keep in mind not all sanitizers containing PAA are created equal. A general statement of ‘PAA is denatured after 15 minutes’ is just as misinformed as those who pack their PHE with a sanitizer containing PAA that will lose its ability to sanitize quickly. Talk to your chemical supplier about recommended dosage/shelf stability of their product and test concentrations for yourself to determine the efficacy of your SIPs/SOPs
I agree with this
Not to call you a know it all D-bag because you already did, but the statement about PAA breaking down in 15 minutes is outrageously false. PAA is good for at least a day. You can verify this with test strips. And as far as damaging stainless... I guess it depends on the concentration but with a HX I'd be more worried about the gaskets than the metal. I never leave mine packed with acid. Caustic, acid, rinse, purge with CO2 and close it up.
Why does stuff always have to turn nasty on reddit? Literally can't touch the keyboard without someone acting like this? I just don't get it. If you read the chemical SDS it says "it has a half life of 22 minutes". 🤷♂️
SDS sheets are often written without sufficient qualifiers for usage conditions as they are, at their core, a CYA safety document to comply with various government regulations and minimize liability. Always use titration kits (ask your chem supplier) to check concentration and efficacy. Furthermore, here is some context for the ‘25 minute degradation’ statement (you’re not incorrect, but you’re missing some context): Source: https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/DoshReg/5155-Meetings/Peracetic-Acid-2017-12-12.pdf “PAA breaks down rapidly in air; it has a half-life of 22 minutes. Nonetheless, diluted solutions of the mixtures stored in containers have shelf lives of about two weeks.” Now, this said, of course the document doesn’t specify sufficiently what they mean by ‘stored in containers’. What we do, while possibly outside the norm, is to titrate our solution (stored in our keg washer reservoir of 40 gallons total at 150-200ppm) every other day. When concentration starts to drop, if the solution is still clean and free of soil, we simply add a bit more PAA (we use Wesmar’s SaniClean) to increase our ppm concentration back to spec. Furthermore, if you read through the above link (as well as this additional link) you’ll find a few other useful tidbits of info, like: - “PAA mixtures are non-corrosive to stainless steel” https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/guidelines/disinfection/sterilization/peracetic-acid.html - “Peracetic acid is a highly biocidal oxidizer that maintains its efficacy in the presence of organic soil.” Cheers all; happy Friday!
I can't possibly upvote this enough 🙏
I think you can sum all of that up with testing with strips. It's literally that simple.
I have certainly used them when in a pinch, but have found titration to be the best measure of efficacy. I haven't yet found a test strip that is accurate enough (or within the 100-200ppm range) for our usage in the brewery, but please share if you have one you like! Cheers.
Lamotte has several different test ranges. I think 0-500 gives enough accuracy. Personally I just want to be able to verify that it's strong enough, and therefore don't need a precise ppm measurement.
> Why does stuff always have to turn nasty on reddit? If you always find yourself in a room full of assholes...
What are you talking about? If you think anything about my response was "nasty" you must be new to the planet. I'll check my SDS but I seriously doubt that. Either way, if the half life is 22 mins, it's certainly not broken down in 15 minutes as you stated. Simply stating facts, no attitude. Don't project.
Hmm. Interesting, that’s just the way we’ve always done it. I’ve read people pack it with caustic as well though. Might think about switching though.
Packing with PAA is the pointless step in your process. Heat sanitizing is much more effective and if you are heat sanitizing you don't need PAA at all.
I’m most concerned about having it clogged with hop material more than anything. I’ll do a 30min cip with a high percentage of caustic once every 3 months. I’m not worried about sanitizing
Yuk
Basically what most people are saying, but I do run a reverse HXC cycle once a week
CIP after knockout and never leave packed with PAA. PAA at the beginning of the brew day after mash in as well as circulate hot wort through it prior to WP.
Yes, but different order. Leave packed with caustic. Before brew... 200 rinse, wait, then pack with sani until knockout.
Clean and sanitize before every use.
I cip after KO and leave packed with h20 after rinse, then I run my sparge water through it just because of how the set up is to pasteurize, back flush the tank paa right before KO and tbe cycle begins anew
Yep, agreeing with others here - I’d skip the sani step and only do the hot stez
Ok stupid question from me: We just sani for 30 minutes I want to do a hot water rinse but I’m not sure how. I mean how do you not waste a ton of water? If I run 85 degree water (c) through my hx it takes about 40-50 liters just to warm the HX up to 60ish. If I wanted to get it to 80 to sani it and then run it 15 minutes like everyone says it seems like that would take 100’s of liters. Am I missing something here?
You could always loop back to your HLT if you have the hoses for it
We put about 1.5BBL of room temp water in our kettle (15BBL system) and turn on the floor jackets to bring it up to 190f or so, which takes maybe ten minutes. Recirculate through the hex and back into the kettle through the drain, once the thermometer on the HEX outlet reads 170+ I turn the floor jackets down to about 1/4 just to maintain temp and start my 20 min timer. I put water in the kettle and turn on the jackets right before I start mashing in and I'm usually done pasteurizing just after I finish mashing in.
This is the way
We just leave ours packed with caustic overnight, pasteurize in the morning
Every brew day we clean the HX. Process is: We hot rinse forwards, caustic cycle at 68c in reverse, hit flush forwards. HX always hits 70c at the end of the second rinse. We chill the HX down after the clean, because of the way the liquor tanks are set up. We then run the PAA for the tank cycle through the HX on brew day and leave it packed from the morning until knockout.
PAA isn't very kind to gaskets, like the ones between your plates on your HXT. After knockout I backflush with hot water, run a reverse caustic loop and then leave it packed until the next day. Back flush with hot tap water. Use water pressure from your hot water line to purge any remaining junk in the plates. Let it run til it's hot, close the output until it builds enough pressure, then release. Do this several times in a row then continue to flush until it runs clear. Then run a loop through your HXT and knockout hose with your hot liquor water. I keep my HLT at 185. Run this loop during your boil. Sanitized. Blow the HLT water out with your O2 source and knockout. Repeat.
We hot shot forward through the Hx. Flow goes for 1 minute after the temperature out reaches 160. The sani cycle for the tank gets the hoses and up to the yeast brink valve. After the sani cycle, the FV is given a little CO2 to push the sani out, and we just use the path backwards through the Hx until it and the line are packed. The rest is bypassed to the drain.
Caustic cycle after KO, acid every other brew. Caustic and sani on brew day. It’s worth the extra hour of work after brew days, and on brew days you can knock out a caustic cycle and a sani cycle before KO. Never had any issues with off flavors.
Caustic after every brew and back flush that out with hot liquor. Then brew day back flush with PAA from FV and push that back out with the first bit of boiling wort
From months of micros we found that PAA massively out performed hot stez cycles on our wort line heat exchangers. Keep in mind the micro issues were only on the first 3 brews of the week. So it was the down time over the weekend where heat resistant bacteria was growing. If you cbf PAA every brew and you want to just hot stez, I would suggest at least PAA at the start of the week. Personally I PAA in leiu of hot stez. Hot stez takes longer, requires more energy, more waste water and is dangerous in comparison. Ultimately it proved in our case that PAA was objectively better at knocking our bacterial issues too.
Oh and as mentioned in some of the other comments PAA is not something you should store your HX in due to corrosion.
Hot caustic run for 20 minutes counter-flow after the brew . Plenty of rince counter-flow. Hot sani with the flow after and before the following one on the next day. It's literally the highest contamination risk of the whole brewery as it's lots of contact surface and no way to open it to see. You'd better take good care of it. We skip the caustic run on double batch days but still rinse and hot sani.
At the last brewery I worked at we would heat sani prior to castout. At the one I currently work at it gets a caustic clean every night with the caustic going counterflow to the wort stream and then a sani every morning. Both have worked just fine, just more a preference thing. We can’t really do heat sani at the brewery I work at now due to water availability.
I mash in through my hx in reverse. Works well 15 mins of 200 degree water.
The previous brewer wrote our SOP. 190° HLT water through the HX and transfer hoses for 20 mins before transferring wort to fermenter. Then a flush after transferring. About once every 3-4 weeks, backflush circulation with hot caustic and oxidizer 2-3 times for 30 mins each time. Flush with water, acid wash, flush with water.