11 December 2015

Is your beer line cleaner intelligent?

You could say that line cleaning hasn’t been at the sharp end of innovation. So the introduction of ‘intelligent’ colour change to give the user instant feedback on the hygiene state of each line has been a genuine and much needed product improvement.

But beware, because not all colour beer line cleaners have colour-change technology. Did you know that some manufacturers refer to purple dye in their beer line cleaner as ‘colour indicator’? But these simply indicate that there is beer line cleaner in the line. The fundamental difference is that purple-dye beer line cleaners will always be purple, potentially giving the user the false impression their lines are clean, while colour change beer line cleaner is only purple when your lines are free from organic contamination.

And there are more differences. If you’re going to use colour-change beer line cleaner, you need to ensure that it’s ‘intelligent’ – that means that the change of colour is sensitive to the presence of contamination at specific points along the line, and accurate and meaningful in the degree of colour change. Some purple colour-change beer line cleaners are so dark that you can’t detect contamination unless it’s really heavy, thereby cancelling out the benefits.