Have you ever tasted a draft beer at a bar and thought, “Ugh! I thought I liked this beer, but no!?”
Don’t blame the brewery. The chances of it being the brewer’s fault is not impossible, but the culprit is often a dirty system, according to the experts.
“If it’s really bad, I can smell it as soon as I walk in — it smells like butter,” said Jeromy Krom, owner of Clear Line Draft.
He’s not talking about the movie theater.
If you notice that aroma as you enter a bar or restaurant that doesn’t peddle in popcorn, it’s possible you have entered a different realm, one where craft brewers cry themselves to sleep and modern beer aficionados never dare travel. Or rather, they simply stick to beer in a can.
In dirty draft beer systems, carefully crafted and kegged suds can morph into an off-flavored mess. Worse, they can make you feel crummy the next day and even pose a potential health hazard. That’s why consistent draft cleaning — basically disassembling every little part, from tube to faucet, and flushing it all with detergent and water — is not a should but a must.
It’s a time-consuming task that requires mechanical and chemical knowledge. Despite the ubiquity of draft systems, it’s still not a step that everyone takes or even realizes is a thing.
“It is a bit of a Wild West because it’s not regulated at all,” explained Krom as he serviced the system at Bar Rosa in Tacoma on a Wednesday in March.
The wood-fired pizza restaurant in the Hilltop neighborhood is outfitted with a high-quality, short-draw system, he said. The tap wall is located on one wall of the walk-in cooler, the kegs directly on the other side, a common setup in beer-focused bars and breweries. This distance matters because the beer then runs a short sprint — just a few feet. A kegerator, in which the kegs sit directly under the faucets, also limits the time spent in tubes. Long-draw systems can run hundreds of feet.
A small handful of states including Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania requires routine cleanings, but enforcement and legislation more broadly remains limited. Some beer distributors have provided “complimentary” cleaning services, but that practice has been discouraged by the three-tier alcohol system (producer, wholesaler, retailer).
Regardless, said Bethany Carlsen, who in 2020 started The Funk Busters with her partner Greer Hubbard, a lot of those cleanings are just done wrong — if they are happening at all.
“Anywhere that has a draft system needs cleaning,” said the former professional brewer. “It’s gross to think about mold inside of draft lines.”
Yet just 1 in 5 establishments routinely clean their draft systems, they estimated, and about half of those might be shoddily done.
“It’s not a very well-known process. It hasn’t really been a business that has been out in the open,” continued Carlsen, but tidy lines are “a really important piece of the puzzle when you’re in the beer industry.”
The Brewers Association, which advocates for independent U.S. breweries, recommends at a minimum bi-weekly cleanings and a quarterly acid cleaning to remove beerstones, essentially calcium and other organic substance build-up. Vinyl tubing should also be replaced annually.
In honor of Tacoma Beer Week, which runs March 1-9 with various, free-to-enter events at beer bars and breweries around Pierce County, we caught up with The Funk Busters and Clear Line Draft to understand why clean beer matters. Importantly, we wanted to know what to look for when ordering and drinking draft beverages.
VISIBLY DIRTY FAUCETS
Sometimes you can just see the gunk. If you can get a good view of the faucets from your barstool, look for black gloop (mold) and white or gray spots (yeast gone bad).
“If the faucets are bad on the outside, they’re bad on the inside,” said Greer. That’s also why bartenders should not be pushing the pint so high into the faucet that it touches the glass or the beer going into it.
That gunk can also be a sign that the taps are cleaned in the slapdash “static” style,” added Krom, as opposed to the preferred “recirculating” method.
With static, the components are generally not removed, and a lot of stuff can build up in the nooks and crannies of those small-diameter holes and gaskets. In recirculating, every faucet is removed and cleaned separately. The tubes are disconnected from the kegs and cleaning hoses are looped in a circuit pattern, flushed with an alkaline detergent for at least 15 minutes and then with water until it runs clear.
FOAMY BEER IS BAD
Aside from the fact that drinking foamy beer is no fun, foam is another easy-to-spot sign.
Poor calibration of the gas or pumps that make draft beer possible can be part of the problem, as can a holding temperature that’s too hot or too cold, “but it’s probably just filthy,” said Krom. Gunk causes a “turbulent flow,” as he described the soapy sputter, and “we want a nice, open, easy flow.”
If you see the bartender open the tap to let beer flow before placing the glass under it, or if the beer is oddly flat or unusually foamy, “Something’s wrong,” said Carlsen. “You shouldn’t have to run the beer before you put the cup under it.”
FUNKY SMELLS AND OFF-PUTTING FLAVORS
That buttered popcorn aroma comes from diacetyl, which forms during the fermentation process but is usually reabsorbed into the yeast — so much so that it would be undetectable in the finished product. It’s a bit confusing because some styles, such as British ales and Czech-style pilsners, purposely retain low levels of diacetyl, lending a slickness and butterscotch vibe. It could also point to a flaw in the brewing itself, according to the Cicerone Certification Program, the beer world’s equivalent of wine’s Master Sommelier.
If you’re familiar with the beer and you usually trust the brewery, said Carlsen, bad beer is often the fault of naturally occurring yeast that languishes in hidden tubes. Think of an off-putting combination of popcorn-meets-Sour Patch Kids with a hint of vinegar — the marriage of diacetyl, lactobacillus and acetic acid.
Similarly, she added, if you order a pilsner or a lager that “should be crystal clear, and it’s cloudy, that could be dirty lines.”
Keep in mind that unexpected flavors can also occur when kegs are haphazardly swapped. Lager lines should be kept on lagers, for instance, while darker beers like porters and stouts should have dedicated taps. When setting up the cleaning circuit, Krom arranges the hoses so that darker beers, extreme sours and other modern draft beverages like coffee, soda and cocktails are at the end of the run.
Sometimes a bar should probably just replace the tube after having a beer with heavy spices or juices, he said. Ingredients like cinnamon, clove and pepper “just never leave the line.”
‘JUST ASK’
If you want to be sure, both Clear Line and Funk Busters agreed that it’s OK to ask.
“I have a lot of friends that text me, like, ‘Is this place safe?’” joked Krom. “A lot of the lack of draft cleaning is very much out-of-sight, out-of-mind — until they have a tangible problem they can see.”
Often that problem comes in the form of customer complaints, he said.
“If a bar is cleaning their lines regularly, any bartender should know that,” added Greer, who also worked as a brewer for more than a decade. “I would just ask: ‘Do you clean your draft lines and how often?’”
Both companies’ clients run the gamut from small restaurants to dive bars, breweries and beer-focused taprooms to big venues like stadiums, so it’s hard to know who’s up to what without looking under the hood — or just speaking up.
If the answer is, “We don’t,” said Greer, common excuses include not rotating styles, short lines or slow beer sales.
“Those are all wrong. Even if you have the same Bud Light keg on the same line, you need to clean it.”
