How To Clean A Beer Tap

Close-up of a bartender's hands pouring beer from a tap

If your eatery or bar has beer on tap, you lot already know how much customers appreciate a practiced pour. Beer on tap tends to taste amend, and from a business organisation perspective, buying kegs gives you a better margin than buying it in bottles or cans. For most restaurateurs, beer taps are a win-win.

2 Reasons To Clean You Beer Taps: Taste & Safe

But one affair that's easy to forget are the food safety issues associated with your tap organisation. Over time, yeast, mold, and bacteria build up in the tap lines running from the keg to the tap. Fruit flies and other bugs, attracted to the residuum beer leaves behind, can also climb up into your beer taps and pollute the line.

All this means beer doesn't taste equally good as it should. Information technology also ways you can inadvertently sicken your customers. Those lines need to exist cleaned at least once a week, perhaps more frequently if you lot serve a lot of it. Fortunately, cleaning beer lines is an easy procedure that anyone on your staff can accomplish with about ten minutes of training.

To outset, plow off your CO2 supply at the regulator on the tank. This is a very important step considering y'all absolutely must make sure the lines are depressurized! Next, disconnect the CO2 line from the coupler on the keg itself, and then disconnect the tap line. The CO2 line usually comes into the side of the coupler at a xc degree angle and the tap line comes out the height of the coupler and goes up through the bar to your beer taps.

Disconnect the coupler from the keg and soak it in warm water along with a detergent designed for tap cleaning. This is of import considering regular detergent isn't as effective at breaking downwards the yeast and sugar buildup particular to beer.

How To Clean Beer Taps Yourself

To clean the tap line itself, you'll need to collect a few tools start:

•   A 5 gallon bucket (preferably color coded ruddy because you are using sanitizer)
•   A keg beer cleaning kit (ordinarily includes a plastic bottle with a hand pump, length of hose, and a coupler)
•   A tap wrench

Make full the plastic bottle with tap line detergent and warm water. Mix well. Employ the tap wrench to remove the tap faucet and soak this in the same bucket with your keg coupler. Side by side, connect the coupler on the stop of the hose attached to the bottle to the tap where you lot unscrewed the tap faucet. Go dorsum underneath the bar and brand certain the other terminate of the tap line (where information technology connects to the keg coupler) is fix to drain into your ruby 5 gallon bucket.

Pump the solution from the bottle through the tap line and let it fully drain into the bucket. It's normally good to permit information technology sit down for five minutes or and so to let that detergent work on whatsoever buildup in the line. Rinse out your pump canteen and refill it with cold fresh water. Reconnect it and pump that water through the line.

While you're waiting for that to drain, take a pipe cleaning brush and clean out the coupler and tap faucet. This is also a good fourth dimension to check the rubber gaskets on both and replace sometime or worn ones. Reconnect the system and you're fix to starting time serving fresh, succulent beer once again!

Finally, become a tap faucet plug for your taps to foreclose bugs from itch into the tap lines when they aren't in utilise. This plug doubles as a pipe brush when you clean your tap arrangement.

15 minutes a calendar week should exist plenty for you to brand one of your best selling items (with a good margin!) always tasting great and safe for your customers.

Source: http://blog.etundra.com/food-safety/beer-tap-line-cleaning/