Ask anyone here what they did today and the honest answer is cleaning. A brew day is roughly two hours of decisions wrapped in six hours of scrubbing, and the ratio does not improve as the brewery grows.

Why it takes so long

Every surface the beer touches has to be cleaned and then sanitised, and those are two separate jobs. Caustic lifts the protein and hop residue, an acid rinse takes the mineral scale, and only then does the sanitiser have a clean surface to work on. Skip a step and you are sanitising dirt.

What a dirty brewery tastes like

Not obviously dirty. It tastes like a beer that was fine last month and is slightly sour this month, or a keg that turns two weeks before it should. Infection rarely announces itself. It just makes everything a little less good until somebody works out why.

How we keep it honest

Tanks are cleaned the day they empty, not the day before they are filled. Hoses come apart every week. The lines in the taproom go through a full clean every fortnight, which is more often than most bars manage and is the single cheapest thing we do for the beer.