So I’m curious how long everyone keeps a batch of cleaner around.
For example, I make a gallon of One-Step solution in a clean jug that I keep sealed and in the fridge, and will hang onto it and use it for a couple of weeks after mixing it.
Same thing with PBW. I’ll fill a keg half way and let it sit. Turn the keg over, let it sit. But instead of dumping, I’ll transfer the PBW to another keg or two to do the same thing rather than pouring it out and mixing up more.
What does everyone else do? Hang onto batches of cleaners for a while, or mix up new stuff whenever it is needed?
I get the most use out of it that I can on the day it is mixed and then mix up new when it is needed.
I’ve heard that One-Step is good for up to a week, but I never trusted it past brewday. I mix up 5 gallons of Star-San using RO water, and reuse it for maybe 6 months or so.
I’m a really cheap brewer, so I store my glass 6.5 gallon carboys wet, with a mild bleach solution.
PBW is great stuff, don’t get me wrong, but as a cheap brewer that has several 6.5’s, I don’t see the utility in PBW. A week or months-long soak in mild bleach will both clean and nuke any biologicals that happened to make an ill begotten homestead in my fermeter. A quick flick of the carboy brush around the kreusen line gets rid of the stubborn stuff.
Yeah, yeah, but bleach means a lot of rinsing. Jet blasting a carboy isn’t the hardest thing in the world to do and if you use a mild bleach solution it takes about three rotations of the carboy to get the bleach smell out–but you’d do that with PBW anyway, right? Best of all, it gives me redundancy on the sanitization front. I know my starsan is working on a nuked environment.
PBW is great stuff for CIP facilities, but my home brewery is anything but CIP. Subsequently, I like mild bleach solutions. It’s cheap and it works.
