I noticed this brown haze when I was cleaning up from my last brew. Do you think I just need to scrub harder or with more aggressive cleaners or is this a case of needing to passivate? My brewpots are legit keggles ( I don’t want to start that conversation).
I can’t see it in the pic but what you describe sounds like beer stone. I find it comes off okay if you scrub with hot PBW solution soon after brew day. I believe there are acid cleansers specifically designed for the removal of beer stone.
I do nothing until it gets a lot worse than that, then I scrub with BKF.
Yeah can’t see anything. But that brown “layer” comes off very easy with some bar keepers friend. Beerstone is white and forms in kegs, aging and serving tanks tanks. It is scaly and very difficult to remove with bar keepers friend and seemingly impossible to remove with just elbow grease. The brown stains will come off with elbow grease. The brown stuff is often referred to as beer stone but I don’t believe this is accurate. Maybe someone can tell us ???
Beerstone is mostly calcium oxylate, which is hard like a stone. Therefore it is most easily removed by dissolving, instead of mechanically removing by hand. It is deposited onto the kettle surface during the boil and continues to be deposited through time, temperature and level of calcium available in the wort.
The brown stuff that forms in kettles is nothing like you describe for beerstone. It is not hard like a stone and it is not difficult to remove by hand. The white stone like subatance that forms in fermentors and kegs, is exactly like you describe except it is formed on the cold side. Or are you saying it manifests itself in two different forms based on hot-side vs cold-side?
It is hard to see in this picture. It appears as a brown haze.
I did clean with Bar Keepers friend and scrubbed it very well with a green scrub pad. I mention green because in the literature that came with my new conical from Stout Tanks, it says not to use a 3M green scrubby but Blue 3M scrubbies are OK.
Acknowledgement: clearly I get too OCD at times…
I call it “wort film”, because that is what it is like. I had beerstone and had a hard time diagnosing it because there is a lot of differing notions out there. I finally found one that described my problem exactly and was then able to get rid of it. Beerstone sucks, wort film is a non issue and easily cleaned. Like Denny , I wait a clean my kettles every six months or so. I have used green scrubbies on all my stainless steel.
Does beer stone in kegs cause off flavors? Assuming so, right?
Beerstone gives beer spoilers a safe place to hang out away from surface sanitizers.
I can’t see much in the picture, but I could see Five Star Acid #5 being a good product to use for what you describe.
The picture isn’t clear.According to your description,it maybe beer stone.