​Maintaining a Clean Brewery

Broadcast Date: March 28, 2019

View the Webi​nar Post Session Q&A

Webinar Summary

Every brewery employee understands the need to maintain the highest standards of cleaning yet microbiological issues occur in every brewery. In many instances brewery personnel have not considered the factors that affect cleaning or whether the products that they are using are suitable. In addition, equipment may not be performing as it was intended or may have been installed incorrectly. The cleaning regimens for each stage of the brewing process differ between breweries, sometimes considerably, due to different equipment and process conditions, and sometimes a lack of information or an understanding of the nature of the soils that need to be removed. Resolving cleaning issues requires detailed investigations and more importantly time, that many brewery professionals do not have and so the problems persist or keep re-occurring.

This webinar is an introduction to a recently written book where cleaning issues are addressed and potential solutions presented. In many instances cleaning issues could be resolved before they became an issue if some of this basic knowledge was applied.

Richard Rench has a book written on behalf of the Master Brewers entitle Brewery Cleaning - Equipment, Procedure and Troubleshooting. This book is expected to be useful for brewery and quality personnel to better understand the cleaning processes and CIP equipment. In addition, the book describes how to identify and correct problem areas. The reasons why cleaning issues arise are often fairly straight forward but it does take time, effort and knowledge to resolve them. Not only will the webinar discuss some of these issues but there will be opportunity for participants to ask questions related to cleaning issues that they are experiencing.


Webinar Takeaway

All breweries have or will have cleaning issues from time to time. Examining all aspects of the cleaning process and resolving issues proactively is a good investment of a brewer’s time.


About the Presenter

Richard Rench

Richard Rench
Former Brewing Sector Expert for Diversey

Richard Rench was educated in England and has a B.Sc and a Ph.D, in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham. He also holds a Master Brewer Diploma from the Institute of Brewing and Distilling. He joined Bass (now Coors) Brewing as a trainee Brewer in 1975. In the following 13 years he held various production management positions at the Burton-on-Trent Brewery. In 1988, Richard joined the Upper Canada Brewing Company in Toronto. Over a period of 10 years as Vice President of Production and Brewmaster, Richard developed new products, increased production capacity and efficiencies, and constantly developed quality improvements.

Following the acquisition and subsequent closure of the plant, in 1999, Richard joined Diversey as the Materials Site Manager at the Molson Toronto Brewery. The focus was to improve inventory control and optimize the application of materials and utilities to realize sustained cost benefits.

From 2010 until his retirement in 2017, Richard was the Sector Expert for Brewing and Beverage for Diversey North America. He was involved in the auditing and improvement of CIP systems as well as problem solving in all areas of many different breweries. Recently, Richard has been working as a brewery consultant, on a part-time basis, leaving sufficient time to play golf, vacation and to monitor the most important output of the brewer’s efforts – the taste of the beer.