Five Star Chemicals has been producing cleansers for commercial breweries for some time, and has now packaged their cleaning technology into home brewing sized packages. Their approach is twofold; the brewer first uses Powdered Brewery Cleaner to remove deposits from equipment, and then uses Star San, a professional grade soaking sanitizer, to sanitize the cleaned equipment. Both PBW and Star San are safe for limited contact use with stainless steel, plastic, copper, brass, and ceramics, and are safe for septic systems.
This four pound jar of PBW will make up to 48 gallons of dilute scrubbing cleanser (should be used in combination with Star San, a non-rinsing Sanitizer).
You can be the first to ask a questions.
PBW
Pros: simple to use and does a great job
Cons: somewhat expensive
This stuff Rocks!
Pros: Excellent Cleaner, Bottles and Equipment look great, and it makes label remover a snap! Also, works to clean the mildew smell from front loading washing machines. I highly recommend PBW to anyone.
PBW cleaner
Pros: Fast, effective cleaner of almost any type of deposits, especially where it's hard to scrub, such as inside thermos bottles or pipes. If you can scrub the material, you can make a thinner mix. Cons: Expensive, and you probably should wear gloves if you put your hands into the solution.
Works Great
This product works much much better than Oxi-clean with less foam generated. The only thing that would better is if it was also a sanitizer as well.
4 lbs is better than 1 lb.
I finally bought this big size tub after having gone through several one pounders. Within days of receiving it, a guy I'd never met who was giving up home-brewing gave me an old corny keg (for free!). I got it home and looked inside at some nasty fossilized crap. I'm convinced the beer gods rewarded my purchase. If you buy a 4 lb. tub of PBW, maybe you'll be as lucky as me. If not, you'll still have 4 lbs. of PBW at a very good price.