CIP Recipe

As with most beers, the proper cleaning recipe consists of just four ingredients. When it comes to the cleaning done within your brewhouse or distillery, these four ingredients are always the same: Time, Temperature, Chemical Action, and Mechanical Action. Your trial and error, and finding the correct balance of each ingredient is what makes this recipe custom to your tanks, tuns, and all vessels.

I will explain each, and point out where to put the most attention for this balance, and the benefits to finding that perfect recipe for you. Work smarter, not harder.

The first ingredient is Time. Lets face it, you will ALWAYS be cleaning. As your operations grow, you can move away from the time consuming manual methods and toward more CIP type cleaning. CIP, or Clean-In-Place, is defined as where you are cleaning your tanks and vessels in their assembled state, where they stand. The amount of time that you spend with preparations, staging, and actual cleaning will decrease as your methods evolve but should always be considered when trying to fit cleaning cycles between dumps and fills. Some will argue that cutting cleaning TIME, with better results, would be one of the quickest ways to see any ROI on upgrades to cleaning methods.

The next ingredient is Temperature. The temperature of the cleaning medium, whether it be water, chemical, detergent or caustic, will always affect the efficiency and results. Even if just using water, the benefits of utilizing a heated cleaning medium outweigh any cost associated with heating it.

“Chemical” Action: Generally the most expensive, long-term, ingredient to your recipe. In this context “chemical” would be any chemical, caustic, detergent, etc., used for the cleaning recipe. The amount required and used is directly related to the temperature available and mechanical method being employed. If heated is available, any required chemical dosing could be altered accordingly and result in drastic savings on chemical usage. Similarly when balanced with the mechanical action, the amount used for a spray and scrub is far greater than that used with spray or impingement technologies. The less non-water additive you use, the longer your inventory of it can last, the more your savings can allocated elsewhere.

The most important ingredient to the recipe is the Mechanical Action. Be it your hand with a spray bottle and a brush, to a static spray ball, up to impingement cleaning devices; mechanical action is essentially a function of how your cleaning medium is delivered to the tank walls. Without this mechanical action, you are just wasting time and money soaking tanks, vessels, and components in expensive heated chemical baths. Once you go from manual mechanical methods to more of the CIP systems, you will find that any investment up front is returned very quickly by saving on all the other ingredients mentioned above. Similar volumes of cleaning fluid will achieve completely different results depending on the pressure supplied and the mechanical action being provided by the device delivering the cleaning fluid.

CIP station