After using your BrewZilla (or any other vessel/kettle used for brewing), you may notice some brown staining occur on the bottom of the unit where the heating elements are located. This commonly referred to as "beer stone" or calcium oxalate and is a common issue related to brewing.
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| Beerstone on the base of our BrewZilla unit |
Beerstone is caused by chemical reactions between water minerals (such as calcium and magnesium) and the proteins found and extracted from malted grains when mashing and boiling. As you can see in the photo of our BrewZilla above, it's pretty unsightly, and can be a place that harbors bacteria and other beer-ruining micro organisms.
We've discovered that this stuff is pretty stubborn to clean off, with the usual sodium percabonate based PBW proving ineffective at removing it.
Fear not though as an easy solution is at hand to help remove this unsightly stain from your BrewZilla (or other brewing equipment) - Bar Keepers Friend!
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| Bar Keepers Friend to the rescue! |
By simply filling the bottom of our BrewZilla with warm water, we just sprinkled some Bar Keepers Friend into the water then scrubbed it with a dish cloth. We didn't use an abrasive scourer in order to try and minimise scratching, so a little bit of elbow grease was required, but the results are fairly impressive (and satisfying) we think.
See for yourself below
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| The after shots speak for themselves |
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| Shiny! |
We've now got a nice deep shine back in our stainless steel BrewZilla with our unit now spotless and ready to go for our next brew day! On top of that, Bar Keepers Friend which contains citric acid, is also a good option for passivating stainess steel so every time you clean your stainless with it, you'll be helping to build up that passivation layer again.
Cleaning is definitely not the most fun or glamorous part of home brewing, but it's arguably one of the most important elements, so definitely don't overlook those stubborn stains on the bottom of your BrewZilla (or other brewing kettle)!
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