My mate David, who knows about these things, said that I really should be using Purple Line Cleaner to clean my beer engine and pipes. I’m not in the pub business, so this was new to me – I knew there were chemicals for cleaning beer lines, but I’d never really investigated it in any detail.
We’ve always cleaned the beer engine by washing it out with warm water after use, and also washing it through before use to freshen it up. But I think this is resulting in the cylinder of the engine getting rather gunked up with beer residue – see my previous blog post showing it being taken apart and cleaned. (As an aside, this is one of the most popular blog posts of all time on my blog. Funny what traffic Google drives to your blog).
So, what’s the deal with purple line cleaner? Well you draw it through the beer engine and it cleans things of course. But the clever bit is that when it is still removing “dirt” from the engine and lines, the cleaner comes out a different colour. Once it comes out the same purple that it went in your lines are clean. Dead simple!
My purchase of the cleaner also resulted in me buying some dedicated white buckets so that I can see exactly what colour the cleaner is coming out.
Since this is kind of visual, I’ll leave you with a few photos. Note the greeny-grey cleaner coming out in the third photo (still dirty), and then the purple cleaner coming out in the final photo (clean!).
