The Cleaning Power of Steam

Smog City Brewing Founder and Brewmaster Jonathan Porter uses a steam generator for many tasks around the brewery, from deep-cleaning barrels to dealing with pesky floor drains and de-stickering kegs and other equipment.

goes into making beer, and enterprising homebrewers are skilled at cobbling together the gear they need, whether it’s a cooler mash tun or a hopback built from plumbing parts. Once a brewer goes pro, the ability to get the most out of limited resources becomes even more important.

Working on the edge of their production capacity with tight margins and growth can compound these challenges. The pains that come with expansion provide the resourceful brewer with ample problem-solving opportunities, and any incremental improvements to process and efficiency can help them make better, more consistent beer. When Smog City Brewing in Los Angeles took over a warehouse near their production brewery to house a growing collection of wine barrels, Founder and Brewmaster Jonathan Porter needed to balance making the regular production beer that keeps the lights on in the brewery with all the additional tasks required to process and fill all that oak.

“Barrels aren’t cheap, but all the labor they need is the bigger investment,” Porter says. “There’s a lot of money in that oak,” he says, gesturing toward the barrel warehouse, “and it’s slow to return any revenue.”

Looking for a way to both protect his investment into all that oak and streamline the ingress of newly acquired barrels into Smog City’s barrel room, Porter turned to an old technology that’s become popular with winemakers: steam. The Swash Deluxe, a portable steam generator from ARS Enterprises, creates high-pressure, high-temperature “dry steam,” and the castbronze attachment known as a Bordeaux wand is built to cleanse and condition oak barrels.

The 350-pound machine looks like a cross between a pushcart and a Star Wars droid, and the wheeled boiler can be moved to the barrels that need to be cleaned. It requires 220-volt power and a waterline to create the culinary-grade steam that’s free from additives and has very low mineral content. A specialized steam hose connects to the outlet ball valve, and various accessories can be clamped onto the hose. The Bordeaux wand is a meter-long brass baton that

Clockwise from top » Jonathan Porter of Smog City Brewing purchased a steam generator primarily for barrel cleaning but now uses it for a variety of brewery cleaning tasks; the Bordeaux wand attachment is built for cleansing oak barrels; the machine...