Equipment

Cleaning in place

What is CIP and does it make sense at small scale?

In short

A CIP system is a pump, a heated tank or two, a route through the equipment being cleaned, and a return. Solutions are circulated in a defined sequence — rinse, alkaline wash, rinse, acid wash, rinse, sanitise — with the time, temperature and concentration of each stage specified.

The point is repeatability. A hand-cleaned tank is as good as the person who cleaned it that day; a CIP-cleaned tank is as good as the recipe, which can be verified and recorded.

It only works if the equipment was designed for it. Dead legs, threaded fittings, ball valves and anything the flow does not reach are cleaned by hand regardless of what the CIP set is doing.

How a tank is actually cleaned in place

The interior is wetted by a spray device fitted at the top: a static spray ball with drilled holes, or a rotating jet head that sweeps the surface with a higher-impact stream. A static ball relies on falling film — the solution runs down the wall — and needs the right flow and pressure to produce full coverage; too little flow and the pattern does not reach the shoulders, too much and the ball simply atomises the solution. Rotating heads use less solution to achieve more mechanical action and take longer per cycle.

Solution collects at the base and is returned to the CIP tank by a return pump or by gravity, so it can be reheated, redosed and reused. Recovering caustic like this is a substantial part of the economics at scale.

Pipework is cleaned by flow rather than by spray, and the requirement is turbulent flow at a velocity sufficient to scour the wall. A line cleaned at too low a velocity has laminar flow next to the pipe wall, which is precisely where the soil is, and the cleaning solution passes through without doing anything.

Where CIP fails

Dead legs: any branch, sample point, sight glass or capped tee where flow does not pass. The rule of thumb in hygienic design is that a branch should be no longer than a small multiple of its own diameter, and anything longer is cleaned by hand.
Ball valves with an internal cavity, which hold product regardless of position; butterfly valves with a removable seat are preferred in the product path.
Threaded connections, which cannot be cleaned in place at all; hygienic clamp fittings exist because of this.
Spray shadows behind agitator shafts, baffles, thermowells and manway hinges.
Gaskets that have swollen or crept out of their groove, leaving a crevice behind them.
A pump that is too small for the spray device fitted, which is a design error that looks like a working system.

Verification

A CIP cycle that has run is not the same as a CIP cycle that has worked, and the difference is verification. The usual measures are recording the parameters — temperature, concentration by conductivity, flow, time — and separately testing the result, by swabbing surfaces for adenosine triphosphate as a rapid proxy for organic residue, by microbiological swabs, or by rinse-water testing.

Riboflavin coverage testing is the standard way to prove spray coverage: the interior is coated with a fluorescent solution, the cycle is run, and the tank is inspected under ultraviolet light for anywhere the solution survived. It is a direct answer to the question of whether the spray device actually reaches everything.

Recording matters beyond the cleaning itself, because in most jurisdictions a food business must be able to demonstrate its hygiene controls rather than merely assert them.

At small scale

A full CIP set is not a small producer’s purchase, but the principles scale down and the useful ones are free. Circulating a cleaning solution with a pump through a hose loop cleans tubing far better than filling and emptying it. A spray ball on a length of pipe dropped into a tank, fed by an ordinary transfer pump, is a genuine improvement over a brush on a stick. Fitting hygienic clamp connections instead of threaded ones costs a little more once and removes an insoluble problem permanently.

The most valuable small-scale borrowing from CIP thinking is not equipment at all but the recipe: writing down the sequence, the concentration, the time and the temperature that is actually used, and then following it every time. That converts cleaning from a matter of diligence on the day into a process that can be checked and improved.

Also answered on this page

Questions this page covers, so you can tell at a glance whether it is the one you want.

What does CIP stand for?
How do you clean a sealed tank?
What is a dead leg in pipework?

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

What should i know about stainless steel fermentation tanks — A stainless tank is a welded vessel, usually cylindrical, in an austenitic stainless grade chosen for corrosion resistance in acidic, chloride-containing conditions. It contributes nothing to the cider and lets no oxygen in.
Why does everyone say cleaning matters more than anything else — Cleaning removes soil — pomace, lees, tartrate, protein and the biofilm growing in it. Sanitising reduces the number of viable organisms on a surface that is already clean. They are two separate operations and the second does not work without the first.
How do i sterilise cider bottles — Wash them clean first, then sanitise with a no-rinse sanitiser or a sulphite solution, and fill while still wet with it. Bottles that look clean but have dried deposits inside are the usual source of bottle spoilage.
What do caustic and acid cleaners actually do, and how are they handled
What does a farm cider mill or a commercial cidery actually consist of
What kind of pump should be used for cider, and can a pump damage it

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

Cider and perry production technical training material
Peter Mitchell / Cider and Perry Academy · reference work · registered as competent for this subject
Searched again on 2026-08-25 and it remains the one printed source here that a bibliographic check cannot fix, because it is not a published work with an edition. It is course material issued to participants of a training programme, so there is no catalogue record to verify, no ISBN, and no lawful public copy. Its state stays `registered` for that reason rather than through inattention.
Hochschule Geisenheim University — beverage technology
Hochschule Geisenheim · university · retrieved 2026-08-24
German beverage-technology research covering apple wine and fruit juice processing, including the enzymology of clarification.

Where to go next

Cider making equipment — The rest of the equipment material, grouped by what each piece is for.
How cider is made — The methods this equipment exists to carry out.
Troubleshooting — The faults that are traced back to equipment and to cleaning.