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Bar Maintenance 101: How to Clean Your Draft Lines

December 11, 2017 Management

 

Aside from your awesome and trendy drink menu, your bar’s cleanliness has a great impact on your business as well. Customers like a well-maintained, clean, and safe establishment.Tidiness goes beyond shiny floors, tables, and glasses. Your drinks, especially your beers, should be clean too. And to have sparkling clear beers, your beer system and their draught lines should be maintained regularly. 

 

Dirt-free draft lines produce fresh and quality beers. If you don’t clean them often, they might collect yeasts, molds, bacteria, and calcium deposits that can flake into the line.  These gross things can negatively affect the taste, aroma, and quality of your beer. As a bar manager, you must make sure that your lines are cleaned every two weeks or every half keg. You can either hire an independent contractor or do it by yourself.
 
If you decide to clean the lines yourself, here’s a complete step-by-step guide for you.

How to properly clean lines? 

1. Detach all of the kegs from their lines. Make sure to disassemble the faucets and handles as well.

2. Connect all the lines together.
3. Once connected, flush the line with cold water. This will remove the traces of beer that are still in the lines.
4. Run a warm cleansing solution (about 35 to 45 C◦) through the lines for about twenty minutes. Doing this will break down all the bacteria in the lines.
5. Apart from the two-week regular cleaning, you must also do an acid cleaning every quarter. Acid cleaning will break down beer stones and other hard buildups in your lines.
6. After soaking and cleaning the lines, rinse them with cold water to get rid of the remaining cleaning solution.
7.  Test the pH level of the water coming out of the line to ensure that it’s completely free of cleaning solution.

 

Aside from flushing your lines, you also have to clean the other parts of your beer system 

Additional tips

1.Scrub the faucets you disassembled earlier. Include the handles and the area around the faucets. Beer can leak down them and leave some residue, yeast, and mold behind.
2.Before you reattach the couplers, clean them first.
3.While scrubbing the faucets and couplers, check their seals, gaskets, and O-rings to determine if they need replacing. Vinyl lines should be replaced annually or as often as required to keep them in good condition.
4.Once everything is cleaned, reassemble your lines.
 
Dedicating some time to cleaning and maintaining your beer system will surely benefit your business. When you have delicious, fresh, and clean beer your bars’ reputation will be squeaky clean too. Remember, a business with a good reputation has the power to keep happy customers and gain new ones.

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