Two buildings.
One lease.

No, and you should be wary of anyone who says yes. CIP is brewing rather than cleaning: it runs caustic and acid at injuring concentrations, the vessels are confined spaces, and the cycle is what decides whether your batch is sound. It stays with your brewers, your chemistry and your verification records. We clean the room your tanks are standing in, which is the part that is usually under-served.

Some of it, and not all of it. The taproom, the amenities and the packaging area are straightforward. A live brew deck has hot liquor, caustic in use, wet floors and hose runs underfoot, so the honest answer depends on your layout and your day. We would rather book around your brew calendar than be an extra body on the deck on transfer day.

No. Beer line cleaning is cellar work on the same side of the boundary as CIP, and it affects what your customer tastes, so it stays with your team or your line-cleaning contractor. We clean the outside of the tap bank, the drip trays, the bar top and the floor and drain under it, which is where the stale smell in a taproom almost always comes from rather than from the lines.

Fortnightly at minimum on the production side, and weekly for a brewery running most days, with the grates lifted and the channel scrubbed rather than hosed. Taproom floor wastes and the drip tray drain want doing weekly. It sounds like over-servicing until you have had an environmental contamination scare, at which point it reads as the least important line on the scope.

It is the first thing we ask a brewery about, before floor area or frequency. CO2 is heavier than air, it pools in cellars, tank pits and any low space, and it displaces oxygen without smell or warning. Our people are instructed to walk out of any space they are unsure about and ask, rather than finish the job.

We walk both sides of the wall with you and ask about your brew calendar before your floor area. Then you get a written scope split into production and taproom with a frequency against every line, the boundary written down explicitly, and a price per visit. No obligation, and we will tell you plainly which parts of your building we are not the right contractor for.

A good quote splits the production side from the taproom, because they are different jobs at different frequencies. The price moves with how much trench drain there is, how tight the tank surrounds are, whether the taproom serves food, and how many days a week you are open and brewing. That's why we quote rather than publish a flat rate that would be wrong for most sites. Tell us the basics and you'll have a price back quickly, with no obligation attached to it.

Clean in place: circulating cleaning solutions through tanks, lines and hoses without dismantling them, usually as a caustic cycle to remove organic soil and protein, a rinse, then an acid cycle to remove mineral scale, followed by sanitising. It is done by the brewing team as part of production because it determines whether a batch is microbiologically sound, and because the chemicals involved cause serious injury without training and the right equipment.

Because fermentation produces a lot of it and it behaves in the least intuitive way possible. CO2 is heavier than air, so it collects at floor level and in cellars, tank pits and any enclosed low space rather than dispersing upward. It has no smell at the concentrations that matter and it displaces oxygen, so someone can walk into an ordinary-looking space and lose consciousness with no warning. It has killed people in breweries and wineries. Monitoring, ventilation and never entering alone are the controls.

Wild yeast, particularly Brettanomyces, and lactic acid bacteria such as Lactobacillus and Pediococcus. They rarely arrive from outside the building; they establish inside it, in drains, floor corners, biofilm under grates, and on the ends of hoses left lying on a wet floor. CIP protects the inside of a vessel and does nothing for the room, which is why environmental cleaning is a microbiological control rather than a cosmetic one.

Yes. Beer is a food for regulatory purposes, which makes a brewery a food business with the usual obligation to keep premises, fixtures, fittings and equipment clean and sanitary under the Food Standards Code, subject to inspection by the local council. If the taproom serves food as well, the full food service obligations apply to that side too. Your council and your own food safety documentation are the authoritative sources. This is general information, not compliance advice.

Both sit outside a cleaning contract. Spent grain is normally collected under its own arrangement, most often as stockfeed for a local farm, on a schedule set by brew days. Trade waste — the wastewater a brewery discharges to sewer — is normally regulated by the local water authority under a trade waste agreement, with its own monitoring and its own arrestor servicing. A cleaning contractor can keep the surrounds of both clean and flag a problem, and that is the extent of it.