How to clean beer nozzles (and have you fallen for the nozzle hygiene myth?)
You can take all the care in the world with cellar hygiene, line cleaning, and ensuring your glassware is pristine, but if you don’t know how to clean beer nozzles all that effort goes to waste.
We don’t need to tell you that by ‘nozzle’ we mean the spout the beer flows through just before it hits the glass, but clarity is often a good thing.
Fear not! Here’s our guide on how to clean beer nozzles – and why it’s important.
Why tap nozzle cleaning is important for quality beer dispense
There’s an industry myth that soaking nozzles, especially in soda water, will keep them clean. It IS just a myth, yet we’ve found as many as one in three pubs, bars, or venues still do it.
Why is it a problem?
Well, you wouldn’t just soak cutlery or glasses overnight and then use them for customers the next day. Nozzles may not pick up germs directly from hands and mouths (!) in the same way, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to be kept clean.
Without daily cleaning, and a weekly soak in line cleaner, germs, bacteria, and other micro-organisms can build up inside nozzles and end up in the beer.
Sometimes they are even visible as floating flakes and lumps. Yuck!
How to clean beer nozzles step-by-step guide
Make sure beer nozzles are cleaned the way and not just left to soak.
- Wash nozzles with a brush under hand-hot water.
- Leave them to air-dry overnight.
- Replace beer tap nozzles in the morning.
If you have fixed tap nozzles, use a Tapball, AKA ‘The Egg’, designed for this very purpose. It’s a tool for flushing water through the fixed tap’s vent, see our video for details.
How often should beer tap nozzles be cleaned?
The short answer is that nozzles should be cleaned every day.
If you’re wondering whether they really need to be cleaned that often, let’s talk about ‘nozzle dipping’.
Nozzle dipping (and why it’s bad)
Ideally, the nozzle from which beer comes out should not enter the beer it’s pouring. It should stay above the liquid.
Dipping might seem a minor thing to worry about, but once it happens a great environment for micro-organisms to get together and a party has been created.
These can then easily spread into the next drink you pour and threaten your beer quality.
Even if no one from your bar team ever dips a nozzle, beer and other drinks are flowing through those nozzles all the time.
As your opening hours tick by and with each pour the residue increases. Daily nozzle cleaning at closing time is essential for preventing that residue from building and ending up in someone’s drink.
Extra weekly nozzle cleaning is also recommended
As well as a daily clean, beer nozzles also need a regular deep clean. We recommend doing this weekly by soaking in line cleaner and thoroughly rinsing the nozzles in clean water afterward. Our video guide explains the process in more detail
The ONLY way to clean nozzles – WEEKLY [VIDEO]
Essential beer tap nozzle cleaning equipment
Cleaning small things can be tricky. The solution is to have the right equipment. This can transform a pain-in-the-bum job, one that rarely happens, into a task that’s easily done.
For thorough nozzle cleaning our beer quality technicians use, and recommend, the Avani nozzle brush – available from our online shop in packs of four or 10.
For weekly nozzle cleaning our VERIFY beer line cleaning detergent, featuring intelligent colour-change technology, not only gives nozzles a thorough cleanse but also shows you how clean (or dirty) they are, on a sliding scale from A to D, and changes colour to reflect this.
For fixed tap cleaning, as mentioned above, we suggest using a Tapball, also available from our online shop.
Nozzle know-how for perfect pints!
Once you know how to clean nozzles the right way, it’s a quick and easy job that gets you one step closer to serving perfect pints.