90% of making beer is cleaning things.

Just in case you didn’t know.

I get kind of crazy about making sure everything’s super-clean and super-sanitized.  It just seems to me that there’s no point in risking the beer!  Even though bad bacteria in beer is rarely harmful — it mostly just makes things taste bad — why mess with it?

Thing is, it’s not just cleaning up after each batch — rinsing out all the kettles, applying hot cleanser to anything that had other-than-water in it, sanitizing bottles, sanitizing everything, refilling with CO2. Cleaning the floors, cleaning the lines, cleaning the cleaning equipment… But then — just to be sure — at the start of each batch, we do a good washing and re-sanitizing.

I hadn’t realized until I started making beer what a germ-o-phobe I was!  That’s probably a good thing in a beer maker, I guess I just hadn’t thought about how, for every 10 hours spent making beer, 9 of them would be cleaning.

It’s still pretty fun, anyway.   🙂

 

I started toying with this new editor that lets me do fun layout things with the click of a button.  Like, here, I played with Drop Cap (the big 1st letter) and wrapping text around an image.  We’ll see how long the fascination with all that lasts…