After my brew today there was a lot of trub stuck to the element of my grainfather. I scrubbed for ages and it's not coming off, the Grainfather cleaner is a load of garbage and barely works. Does anyone have any ideas on hwo to remove this?
Thanks.
I recently made a beerworks part grain kit., which required a mash and boil of grains before adding to to the supplied concentrated wort. I thought I'd be clever and add the wort to my electric brew kettle - result, boil temp stuck at 50-odd degrees, when I finally admitted defeat, switched off and drained, element caked solid in burnt sugar.
I did finally remove it and got my electric kettle working again by a repeated combination of ( tried all of these repeatedly for about a week):
- bicarb of soda mixed into a thick past with water and added to the element with an old toothbrush; leave for 15 mins
- add water to cover the element then boil
- scrub with a wire scrubber
- cover with vinegar solution and boil
- keep scrubbing, with abrasives (wire brush to toothbrush work at different stages, plus every other scrubber I could find under the sink)
- keep boiling between applications and scrubbing
- KEEP APPLYING BICARB OF SODA PASTE
- eventually, you will reach a blissful stage where the burnt sugar starts flaking off in chunks as you boil - just enough water to cover the element,; THIS WILL HAPPEN, EVENTUALLY (*). don't give up. these elements are designed for long life -they will take the punishment. (if your kit always cloggs up, that's a separate problem, but is this a known grainfather problem?)
(* you will be left with a permanent brown stain on the element, a bit reminiscent of an ill-kept but well used bog bowl, but regard this as "patina" - pronounced - "pat in arr", not "pat-eeen-arr" as the current crop of real tv buy-a-piece-of-*****-and-flog-it-on merchants would have it)