Sanitation is one of if not the most important part of brewing. The process by which we brew beer is an organic one using a particular strain of yeast bacteria to produce the flavors we work so hard for in beer. Insufficient sanitation can allow other bacteria like wild yeast and many others that are far worse into your wort. These will reproduce just like the yeast culture and produce off flavors that are almost guarenteed to ruin your batch. If proper sanitation if followed it is very hard to make a beer you won't want to drink.
This is my sanitation prodecure for every piece of equiptment that can come into contact with my beer. I should note that I have never lost a batch of beer yet to bacterial infection either!
Scrub everything with a brush and very hot water. If using glass and stainless steel items this is very easy because you do not have to worry about scratching them and can scrub vigorously.
If you use plastic primary fermentors, tubing, etc make sure you do not scratch the plastic during your scrubbing process. This means using somthing softer than the plastic to scrub with, NOT a steel scouring pad. Scratches in plastic are harbors for unwanted bacteria and if you ever notice any on the inside of your primary it is time to get a new one. This is one of the major reasons people use glass, it is much less suseptable to scratching.
A chemical sanitizer is a solution that kills 99.9% bacteria within some amount of contact time. Thus you MUST use a chemical sanitizer on anything that comes in contact with the beer after your wort production stage.
My sanitizer of choice is called "One-Step". It is available at most brew stores because it is a no-rinse sanitizer. One-Step is an oxygen based santizer that is basically a strong solution of hydrogen peroxide when mixed properly. The advantage of using this sanitizer over others is that hydrogen peroxide breaks down into inert ingredients over time. This means that any residue left from it will not harm your beer or yeast which is why you do not have to rinse after using it. Some people claim that One-Step is not the most effective sanitizer because it is oxygen based, and while they may be true I have never had a batch of beer go bad using my methods and will therefore continue to use impecable One-Step sanitation untill I do because the convenience of no rinsing is so high!
Other sanitizers require you to rinse the equiptment after sanitizing it, which can re-introduce a small amount of foreign bacteria. You must rinse with these sanitizers because chlorine or other residues will kill the yeast culture you are using resulting in incomplete fermentation.
Last Updated: July 12th, 2006