Bucket Blaster Cleaning Hacks: Can It Do More Than Clean Kegs?
The Bucket Blaster has become a favourite piece of home brewing equipment for cleaning Cornelius kegs, pressure fermenters and PET fermenters. It is simple, effective and saves a lot of time compared with soaking, shaking and manually rinsing everything out.
But once you already have one in your brewery, can the Bucket Blaster do more than the jobs it was originally designed for?
In this week’s video, we put the Bucket Blaster to the test with three practical home brewing cleaning hacks. The aim is simple: to see whether this popular keg washer can take on jobs that home brewers might normally expect to need a dedicated brewing pump for.
Bucket Blaster Cleaning Hacks for Home Brewers
The Bucket Blaster is best known as a keg and fermenter washer, but the basic idea behind it is very useful. It recirculates cleaning solution through a spray system, which means it can keep moving cleaner around the inside of brewing equipment without needing constant manual effort.
That opens up some interesting possibilities.
In the video, we try three different setups using equipment that many home brewers may already have, or can easily add to their existing cleaning setup.
What This Video Covers
In this video, we look at:
Using a Bucket Blaster as a simple CIP system
Cleaning a conical fermenter with a KegLand CIP spray head
Testing the same setup on a brewing kettle after brew day
Recirculating cleaner through a four-tap kegerator
Getting more use from brewing equipment you already own
Can You Use a Bucket Blaster as a CIP System?
The first test is using the Bucket Blaster as a basic CIP system. CIP stands for Clean In Place, and it is a method commonly used in brewing to clean vessels without needing to fully dismantle or manually scrub every surface.
By connecting the Bucket Blaster to a KegLand CIP spray head, we test whether it can spray cleaning solution around the inside of a conical fermenter effectively enough to help with cleaning.
For home brewers using stainless fermenters, pressure fermenters or conical vessels, this could be a useful way to make cleaning quicker and easier, especially after a messy fermentation.
Cleaning a Brew Kettle with the Bucket Blaster
Next, we move across to the brewing kettle.
After a brew day, the kettle can be one of the most annoying pieces of equipment to clean. Hop debris, wort residue and dried-on marks can all take a bit of effort to shift, especially if you leave it too long before cleaning.
Using the same Bucket Blaster and CIP spray head setup, we test whether recirculating hot cleaner inside the kettle can help break down the mess and make the clean-up easier.
It is not about replacing common sense or proper cleaning practice, but it does show how a piece of equipment you might already own could be used in a slightly different way.
Can It Clean Multiple Beer Lines?
The final test is beer line cleaning.
We connect the Bucket Blaster to a four-tap kegerator to see whether it can recirculate beer line cleaner through multiple beer lines at the same time. For anyone running a keezer, kegerator or multi-tap home bar, cleaning lines can be one of those jobs that gets put off for too long.
A recirculating setup could make the job easier, quicker and more consistent, particularly if you have several lines to clean in one session.
Getting More from Your Brewing Equipment
The best home brewing equipment is often the kit that can do more than one job.
The Bucket Blaster is already useful for cleaning kegs and fermenters, but these tests show that, with a few simple modifications, it may also be able to help with other regular brewery cleaning jobs.
As always, the key is understanding what the equipment can and cannot do. Flow rate, fittings, spray coverage and the type of cleaning job all matter. But if you already have a Bucket Blaster in your brewery, it is worth thinking about where else it could save you time.
You can watch the full video above to see how each test performed and whether the Bucket Blaster really can take on these extra home brewing cleaning jobs.
