This month’s Fermentation Friday topic (hosted by A World of Brews) is about the hilarious and always entertaining sanitation:

Like most topics in home brewing there are 100′s of different ways to clean and sanitize your equipment. I would like you to post about the process and chemicals you use to prepare your equipment. I would also like you to discuss what you have tried in the past and why you finally settled on your current process.

Yes, that bit about sanitation being hilarious and entertaining was sarcasm. Major, major sarcasm. Sanitation is probably the most boring and wearying topic in homebrewing. Boring, wearying, and, most unfortunately, important. Bleh.

We use four different methods for sanitation — Star San, boiling, vodka, and fire.

Star San (made my Five Star) is an acid based cleaning solution that’s odorless and tasteless. Mix 1 oz in 5 gallons of water, quick contact with your equipment, no rinse, and that’s it. We use this whenever we can’t use our other three methods. So, carboys, tubing, sample taker, etc. We keep the solution in a bucket in the bathroom; it’ll keep for quite a long time as long as the pH stays at or below 3.

A bucket of sanitizer, yyaayyy...

Boiling is obvious. If it’s possible to boil something, we boil it. This mostly just applies to wort.

Besides Bloody Marys, vodka is good for only one thing: killin’ stuff. We keep vodka in a spray bottle, and really only use it when it’s not practical to soak something in a bucket of Star San, like the top of our conical fermenter. Everclear would be better because it’s higher proof, but we can’t buy that in Pennsylvania.

And finally, the only kinda cool sanitizing method we employ is FIRE. We use a small kitchen blowtorch to flame the lip of fermenters and flasks. Really not entirely necessary, but Tim will jump at any excuse to play with fire. Just don’t hold the flame direct to the glass for too long… We’ve shattered growlers before by doing this.

As far as things we’ve tried in the past… We used Saniclean (also made by Five Star) at one point. It’s actually better than San Star because it doesn’t foam. But, it requires longer contact time and you need to use twice as much solution per 5 gallons of water. We also tried Five Star’s IO Star, but the iodine stained our tubing. So, we settled on San Star.

Are you still awake? You are? Congrats on making to the end of this snoozer of a post! Now go make some good, clean beer!