How To Clean The Filter?

[Bandito]

I filtered my beer for the first time tonight, and I'm not sure how to clean it.

Its a Ross type. Do I remove the pleated filter and wash under running water like a spa filter? It does look like a spa filter!

Or can I just reverse the flow, and pump starsan through it. It currently has saniclean in it.

 

[hoohaaman]

Wash off as much trub as possible.Soak in napisan or equivalent till clean,repeat if necessary.Dry,sanitize,filter beer and repeat process.

 

[raven19]

I give mine a good rinse and continual dunking in water to clean most of the yeast out of it, then place back in the housing with some napisan for 24 hours. Then give it a good rinse, then air dry.

Then just give it a rinse in no rinse sanitiser prior to next use.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

After a rough rinse just under the tap - I use a doohickey I attach to the kitchen tap so I get a thin fast stream of water from the hot tap (via a short hose) - I use that to rinse off all the goop, the thin fast stream allows me to get into all the nooks and crannies of the filter. I keep going till I cant see any more "surface" soiling.

Then I soak overnight in pbw, rinse repeat, rinse really really well, dry completely and store.

I used to just soak in nappisan.. but found that over time my filter performance dropped off, taking longer and longer to filter a batch. I figured it was because either pores were getting permanently blocked or that I was getting biofilm build-up and it was cutting down the effective size of the pores. Either way I figured PBW would help to fix it, so an overnight soak in hot pbw happened. Filter suddenly back up to full speed!! So now I use pbw. It sounds like a rampant product endorsement I know, but I think pbw is close to magic in how well it work on almost everything I have tried it on... wouldn't be without it in my brewery.

Before next use I run sanitiser from keg to keg through the filter.

Keg A full of sanitiser
Connect Keg A to filter, connect filter to Keg B
Connect C02 to Keg A
Push the sanitiser through the filter from Keg A to Keg B
When all the sanitiser is through, make sure you allow enough pure gas to run through to push all the sanitiser out of the filter too.
Keg B becomes Keg A for my next filter run.

Then you've sanitised your keg, completely removed all the air and oxygen, sanitised your filter, flushed it with C02 as well and you probably only use 100ml of sanitiser that you don't recover for next time.

I am a fair bit more fussy about it than many other people... but I think that you need to be with filtered beer if you want to get good shelf life. Consider me the anally retentive end of the scale when deciding what you want to do

TB

 

[DUANNE]

:icon_offtopic: im not filtering yet but eventualy i would like to. my question is once sanitised do you let the first litre or so of the beer through and toss it or the lot straight into the keg? it just seems to me you would end up with a lot of either air or sanitiser in the beer.

 

[unrealeous]

:icon_offtopic: im not filtering yet but eventualy i would like to. my question is once sanitised do you let the first litre or so of the beer through and toss it or the lot straight into the keg? it just seems to me you would end up with a lot of either air or sanitiser in the beer.

I start with the filter completely filled with no-rinse sanitizer. I then start running pure CO2 to purge the filter of the sanitizer, leaving only CO2 in the filter. I then move to the beer, and once the filter gets about 20-25% full of beer, I stop the flow, and swish this beer all around the filter to try and remove the remaining saniter solution. This beer gets dumped - again using CO2. Then back to beer and the filtering process commences...

Its a bit of a muck around I suppose - but that's the way I do it. You don't want oxygen in there - and you don't want your beer tasting like sanitizer...