Beer Cleaning and Sanitation with Jon Herskovits – BeerSmith Podcast #62

This week my guest is Jon Herskovits from Five Star Chemicals. and we discuss how to properly clean and sanitize your beer brewing equipment. Beer sanitation is critical to making great beer at home!

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Topics in This Week’s Episode (42:43)

Jon Herskovits, the CEO of Five Star Chemicals is this week’s guest. Jon is a chemical engineer with a degree from the University of Colorado, who has been working on home brewing and commercial cleaning and sanitation products worldwide for 10 years. He just returned from Belgium where he taught a class on sanitation and cleaning for brewing.
We start with a discussion of why cleaning and sanitation is so important for home brewers.
Jon shares some of the risks when homebrewers don’t clean and sanitize properly.
We talk about why cleaning and sanitizing are two different processes – and how they are different.
Jon talks about some common products used for cleaning dirt from our equipment and what advantages and disadvantages exist for each
We talk about which bugs (bacteria, wild yeast) we want to kill off when brewing beer
Jon shares his thoughts on which products work well for sanitation and what the advantages and disadvantages are for each
We discuss why certain sanitizers do not react well with certain materials (plastic, stainless, etc…)
Jon shares which items you need to clean and which ones you need to clean and sanitize in the beer brewing process
Bottle cleaning can be a real challenge – Jon tells us which methods work best for cleaning and sanitizing bottles
We discuss which off flavors commonly occur when you don’t properly clean and sanitize your brewing equipment
Jon gives us his thoughts on brewing sour beers with bugs like Brett or Lacto – which are used to purposely sour beers
We talk about what is different about cleaning and sanitation for beer when brewing on a commercial scale
Jon shares a few resources on cleaning and sanitation including his web site at Five Star Chemicals, and John Palmer’s How to Brew book (Amazon affiliate link).
He gives us his thoughts on his company Five Star Chemicals and shares some of their existing and upcoming products