Draft Line Cleaning: Protecting Your Bar’s Beer Quality & Profits

What if your draft beer sales are suffering because of a simple maintenance issue you're overlooking?

Many bar owners struggle with inconsistent beer quality and waste due to poorly maintained draft lines, leading to lost profits and unhappy customers.

In Today's Episode:

• Learn the proper techniques for draft line cleaning
• Understand the impact on beer quality and profits
• Discover how to implement an effective maintenance schedule.

Master the essentials of draft line maintenance to serve perfect pints every time - press play now.

Learn More:
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Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'

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Transcript

Chris Schneider (00:01.102)
Today, discover why draft lines need to be cleaned and that's crucial for quality and profitability. Learn the step-by-step process for proper line cleaning and master the maintenance schedule that keeps your beer tasting perfect. Today, we are exploring the critical importance of draft line cleaning, the proper techniques to maintain them, and how this impacts your bottom line. Many bar owners underestimate the impact of proper draft line maintenance on beer quality and profits.

which leads to unnecessary waste, customer complaints, bad customer experiences, and most of all, less money in your pocket. By implementing proper cleaning procedures and schedules, you can ensure consistent quality and maximize your draft beer profits. Now, how do we start on this? Well, first of all, let's talk about why clean draft lines matter. So if your draft line isn't clean, you're going to have beer that doesn't taste as good. It's going to affect the quality.

You're also going to have draft lines that pour with additional foam. So your pouring consistency is going to go down and that in turn is going to increase your waste. So when your draft lines don't pour properly, that normally means foam. Foam equals waste.

And like I said, that also means that the quality is worse. Your customers are not going to be as happy. And besides the fact that it's just fricking gross, they can have some issues with health regulations. know, it's nowhere, no health department that I'm aware of, is okay with serving customers something that isn't clean. So how do you clean? You need to have a draft beer cleaning system.

There are some decent ones out there. are multiple. You can get Micromatic. There's another company called

Chris Schneider (01:59.182)
It's HapTech that sells great systems for bar owners and they have videos and everything that support that. So those are the two I would go to.

and you need to get the right equipment. Normally that's going to mean that you have some sort of keg or vessel that you can put cleaning solution in that will hook up to your draft system. And you're going to need with that probably a faucet wrench and some brushes to clean the faucet as well. Now, when you go about cleaning, it's really pretty simple. You take a cleaning keg, you fill it full of solution, you run that solution through your lines.

And I always like to kind of turn the faucet off and on real quick a few times that creates more friction in the lines, which is going to free any beer stone or any sediment that's collected in your lines. But honestly, you're just connecting some solution and running it through. It's really easy to do. Now. The one thing you have to be sure of, and this is where it can be difficult, is you have to make sure that you aren't.

serving cleaning solution when you pour the first couple beers. So you got to pour beer through there. I like to feel the beer as it's coming out the faucet. Cleaning solution tends to be slick. It's slippery. Beer is gritty. So you can actually, and it takes a little bit of time and skill in doing it a few times, but you can actually feel on your fingers the difference between cleaning solution and draft beer. And so you can get to the point where as it's running through the line, you honestly

just feel when it switches from being cleaning solution to being straight beer. Now, some states are going to require you to document all of this. If you need to, great. If you don't, like frankly, I never documented my own cleaning because I maintained a schedule with my cleaning. So what is our optimal cleaning frequency? And that is a great question. for it depends to me, am I rotating beers?

Chris Schneider (04:06.176)
Or am I not rotating beers? Say I have a draft line that's just Budweiser and it's Budweiser, it's always been Budweiser, it will always be Budweiser. I want to clean that every couple of weeks. I'm not worried about cleaning it in relation to when kegs blow, it's Budweiser, it's not that expensive. If I lose a little bit, it's always better to clean kegs after a keg blows before you tap the new one because you're losing less product in that. And how much product you lose is a function of how long your lines are.

That's a different conversation for a different day. But ideally you want to clean everything every couple of weeks if it's a beer that's going to be on long term. Now, when you're doing a lot of rotational beers, when you're tapping a beer and then trying, you're to have a totally different beer on afterwards, the optimal place to clean it is between kegs. So I used to rotate a lot of craft beers and what I would tell my team was, okay, if a keg pops and

myself or one of my managers aren't there, that cake is just closed for the night. Like we just don't replace that beer. We're short a tap or two at the end of the nut. But if we were there, we would just clean it and swap cakes right away.

Chris Schneider (05:23.384)
Part of the reason that we would leave sometimes a draft line just dead overnight so the manager could come in the morning and clean it and things is that if you're going to run draft systems and clean them, you need to be trained on how to take it apart. You need to be trained on how to do it. You need to make sure that you actually have quality control measures in place. And for me,

With my bars, I didn't see that as a bartender function. I saw that as a manager function, so all my manager were trained on it. My bartenders really were not.

Now, the final thing I will say with all of this is always look at your pressure for your CO2. Always look at how much beer you're running through. If you have a glycol system, make sure your beer is coming out cold and the temperature it should be. You need to monitor your overall system effectiveness beyond just the cleaning part of it into some preventative maintenance. And probably it's a good idea when your HVAC guy's out, you know, once a year or so have them clean those condensers and make sure that

your system is running optimally from the refrigeration standpoint.

bottom line here is regular draft line cleaning is essential to maintaining quality, reducing waste, and ensuring customer satisfaction. If you implement a proper and routine cleaning program and maintain a consistent schedule where you clean your lines properly, you can protect your beer quality and maximize your draft beer profits.