5. Various cleaning treatments

As already mentioned, a practice which has become traditional among all keg beer packers is to pre-treat the keg with 7% concentrated soda ash. To this end, 2 to 3 L of this solution are introduced into the keg, just to cover the bung ring on the inside, from a specially equipped station located just after the depalletizer, well upstream of the filling machine, so as to benefit from a fairly long contact time of the soda with the dirt during transfer from the container (before the washing/filling process actually begins).

• This specific treatment station is generally used to remove the carbon dioxide still contained in the returned barrel, and to keep it under pressure so that it can be judged to be leak-proof, but also to check that no attempt has been made to dismantle the barrel plunger and introduce foreign bodies with malicious intent....