Sanitation
Good sanitation is crucial to making good beer. Unfermented beer, or wort, is nothing more than flavored sugar water, and it's a perfect food source for all kinds of microorganisms. To turn that wort into beer, brewers have to make sure that the only microbe that is given access to the wort is the brewer's yeast we select. And the only way to give those yeast a fighting chance is to eliminate, as best we can, all of the other microbes that would compete with them for the nutrients in wort.
There is a key difference between sterilization and sanitation. Sterilization is the complete removal of all microbes and is neither practical nor necessary for brewers. Sanitation, on the other hand, reduces unwanted organisms to such a low level that the brewer's yeast establishes a healthy population well before foreign yeasts or bacteria have an opportunity to gain a foothold.
Brewers divide the brewing process into two phases:
- The hot side is everything that occurs up to and including boiling the wort.
- The cold side is everything that occurs after the boil ends and the heat removed.
While cleanliness is always important, sanitation is crucial on the cold side of brewing. Any potential contamination that might occur on the hot side will be eliminated when the wort is boiled. Boiling kills everything that might be in the wort.
Once we reach the cold side, however, we must be extra careful. After the wort has been boiled, everything that comes in contact with the wort must be sanitized.