Sanitation Is 80% of Brewing

A short meditation on mops, microbes, and the promotion cycle The part of the craft nobody photographsBrewing photographs beautifully. Copper vessels, steam curling through a shaft of light, a bearded person holding a hydrometer aloft with the expression of someone receiving a prophecy. That is the brochure. That is the tap handle, the label art, the Instagram grid. The job is a person in rubber boots at half past five in the morning, elbow-deep in a tank with a caustic solution and a bad attitude, scrubbing the underside of a valve that nobody will ever see. Then rinsing. Then acid. Then rinsing. Then dismantling every hose fitting, because a hose fitting is where good intentions go to ferment. Ask a working brewer what the job actually is. The honest ones say they clean stainless steel for a living and beer occasionally happens as a by-product. The proportion varies depending on who is complaining - seventy percent, eighty, ninety on a bottling week - but the shape never changes.…