For a variety of reasons, I have a 1.5year old flanders hooked up to my kegerator (I was originally planning on bottle conditioning). We chemically pasteurized the beer (camden and potassium sorbate) after cold crashing to knock out the bugs. I was planning on bottling off the perlick tap to store the beer and to free up the tap.
Would running line cleaner through the lines sufficiently put you boys at ease, or would you replace all lines after doing so as well?
I am intrigued. Question: Do you think the camden tabs did in fact arrest the bugs or did it still continue to develop sourness after that? I brewed a sour brown, let it go for a year in the carboy, brewed the same recipe one year later and racked it onto 7lbs of rasberry for a few weeks after primary and then blended the two together for a frambozen–5 gallons bottled and aged for another year and five gallons kegged and enjoyed fresh. Everyone warned me to keep everything the beer touched separate from my brewhouse but it just wasn’t practical. I broke down “everything” and cleaned the hell out of it and then gave it an “extended” soaking in star-san at slightly above recommended concentrations (no scientific basis for that decision, i might add). I would not just run cleaner and sanitizer through your lines. I would take apart the tap and take out all the seals and rinse and soak. That’s what I did. I have had no issues in my brewhouse since then. Some people will swear that i am crazy for not replacing or keeping two sets of equipment. By the way, by the time I finished the bottled version of the farmbozen 1/2 the beer blended in those bottles was more than 3 years old. A labor of love and one of the best, could swear it was made in Belgium, beers i ever made or shared.
Don’t forget that on the homebrewing level, our equipment is generally small enough to disassemble and place in boiling water for disinfection. Only spores can survive that treatment.
I would still run the line cleaner through to get any gunk out and then boil. Then I would follow up with a sanitizer solution. It should be clean at that point. Souring bugs die with heat and sanitizer too. They are not invincible.
I keep a dedicated picnic tap setup just for sours. Just an extra liquid disconnect, hose, and picnic tap that I can throw on sour kegs and drink/bottle from while avoiding having any sour beer running through my normal taps and lines.
yeah, this was my plan, but I got lazy and anxious and was dying to drink the beer! :mrgreen:
so do I need to disassemble the actual faucet and shank to boil them?
For what it’s worth, I will change my picnic taps back and forth between clean and sour kegs. I just spray star san on the posts and plastic hookups. I then occasionally disassemble and sanitize the taps. Your results and practices my vary, but I choose not to worry about it.
