The Cleaner Connection
Products that protect your equipment
by Chris Ryan

That used espresso machine you bought last year now emanates a distinct odor. The prior owners used it constantly to produce tasty espresso drinks, and they never had a problem with it. But now coffee oils have accumulated and formed a rancid residue. In addition to the bad smell, the machine’s filters and tubes are clogged with the residue, making it difficult to produce decent-tasting coffee.

What happened to this once-pristine machine? Sadly, its previous owners didn’t clean and maintain it. A few sprinkles of powder or a few ounces of liquid could have kept it in its good-as-new form.

Several cleaning solutions are available for espresso machines, brewers and grinders. If you use these products regularly, ruined equipment can become a mythical thing, like unicorns or the Easter Bunny, and you can rest assured that it’s doing its job to produce great-tasting coffee drinks.

Espresso machines
Chemical detergents are available—in powder form or as tablets—for cleaning your espresso machine. JoeGlo makes a backflush detergent that was released commercially about four years ago and features a cartoon reminiscent of Homer Simpson on its label. The JoeGlo detergent not only gets rid of residue and oils inside the machine, but it has a built-in water softener, which helps prevent scale buildup, allowing for better water flow through the machine.

Backflushing is the cleaning process used to clean out the shower screen, brew group and three-way valve of an espresso machine. You should perform the process at least once a day and sometimes twice a day with detergent, and additional times during the day with just water. A schedule suggested by JoeGlo owner Jeffrey Pelo is to backflush the machine with detergent at the end of the day’s first rush and again at the end of the day, and then to backflush the machine without detergent during slow times in between.

Matt Milletto, director and barista trainer at the American Barista & Coffee School, offers the following instructions for backflushing using detergent:

1. Remove the portafilter basket and replace it with a blank portafilter basket—a basket without a screen.
2. Put approximately half a teaspoon of espresso machine cleaner into the blank portafilter basket; follow the cleaner manufacturer’s suggested volumes.
3. Insert the portafilter into the grouphead of the espresso machine securely, and engage the machine as if you were extracting an espresso. After roughly 20 seconds, this will cause water to back up and build pressure. Release the pressure by disengaging the pump, and the water will flush through the grouphead via a three-way valve, ending up in the drip tray of the machine.
4. Backflush with the detergent a few times, using 15-20 second intervals. Remove the basket, and you will see the detergent and coffee oils present. Make sure the grouphead has been flushed thoroughly.
5. Remove and rinse the portafilter and basket using water from the grouphead. Make sure to run water through the grouphead.
   
6. Once the grouphead is cleaned of detergent, backflush it a few times to remove any residual detergent. Do NOT add more detergent.
   
7. Use a grouphead cleaning brush to remove any residual coffee grounds and oils from the group and gasket. Also, scrub the dispersion screen. After brushing, use a wet terry cloth towel to clean off the gasket and around the sides of the dispersion screen and grouphead.
   
8. If needed, remove the dispersion screen and soak in detergent and hot water to remove caked-on coffee residue and grinds.
   
9. Once again, remove the portafilter and rinse the grouphead clean. Replace the blank portafilter basket with a normal filter basket.
   
10. To season the grouphead, and to ensure that there is no detergent residue, pull two or three shots through each grouphead that has been cleaned.

JoeGlo owner Jeffrey Pelo says that this last step of re-seasoning gives the metal a slight coating of the new coffee, which helps ensure the proper flavor of future shots. “It prepares your machine for producing coffee,” he says. “So you are not going to get any sort of metal-tinged flavor or anything like that.” Start to finish, the process takes less than five minutes, Pelo says. The JoeGlo powder can also be used to create a soaking solution in which to clean portafilters, steam wands, screens, shot glasses and utensils.

Paul Moynihan, operations manager of Doma Coffee Roasting Company, uses JoeGlo frequently, and says he finds it to be the best of the cleaner options. “It’s just thorough,” he says. “It’s strong enough without being tough on the equipment in terms of corrosion.”

Visions Espresso Service, CDCC Products and Urnex Brands also offer espresso cleaners. From Visions Espresso Service is the Phosphate-Free Visions Espresso Cleaner, which can be used to backflush the machine or to clean carafes and airpots. Klif Borja, sales manager of Visions, says the company’s cleaner does away with phosphates because, though they are effective cleaners, phosphates promote plant growth in water. Borja says that with cleaners containing phosphates, “Down by the drains, you’ll notice a bunch of moss and algae growing, and what that does is choke the aquatic life there. Developing this soap kind of helps decrease the speed at which the plant life grows at the end of the drain.”

A cleaning option from CDCC is the JavaClean series, made up of JavaClean3, for regular espresso machines with portafilters; JavaClean4, for milk frothers and steam wands; and JavaClean5, a tablet for super-automatic espresso machines. Jack Weaver, owner of CDCC Products, says manufacturers of the super-automatic machines prefer tablets be used on their machines because of how they are constructed. “The manufacturers are afraid that if you pour powder in there, that it would stick to the side or something and would go down and get dissolved,” he says.

Urnex offers the espresso machine cleaners Cafiza and Puro Caff, two detergents that foam and break away oily buildup. “Both are designed to foam very nicely so they open up into tubes,” says Josh Dick, president of Urnex Brands. “They’re also both designed to dissolve completely in the very small amount of water that is in the process of an espresso machine backflush.” Both cleaners are powders, but they also come in tablet forms that can be put in a machine’s portafilter with a blind filter in place. The cleaners also can be used to soak the portafilters, spouts, disks and baskets.

Coffee brewers
Urnex also offers powders, liquids and tablets for cleaning coffee brewers. The powder—Urnex Urn and Brewer Cleaner—is the company’s original product, having existed for almost 60 years. Another Urnex cleaning product for brewers is Clearly Coffee, which comes in liquid or powder; Dick says the liquid form is popular with offices because it’s easy to handle, and the powder form is popular with convenience stores because it comes in sachets, with one sachet being ideal for one airpot or one glass bowl.

Urnex also makes the relatively new Tabz, a tablet that the user can drop into the brewing basket and brew. “You drop tablets in based on the size of the pot that you’re trying to clean,” Dick says. “You use the hot water from the machine to dissolve the tablet.”

CDCC Products’ cleaning system for coffee brewers is called FilterPouch. The pouch is CDCC’s signature product, and both it and the company recently celebrated their 10th anniversary. To use the FilterPouch, put it in the brewing basket with an empty pot beneath it and then run the brew cycle. “It keeps the brew basket clean, and it keeps the pot clean without scrubbing,” says CDCC’s Weaver.

Pelo of JoeGlo says his product can be used on coffee brewers as well; unlike other manufacturers, JoeGlo doesn’t have a separate product specifically for brewers. To use JoeGlo to clean a brewer, put the powder in the brewing basket and run a cycle into the pot below.

Grinders

Urnex offers a cleaning option for grinders called Grindz. The cleaner has been out for just over a year and is the first product ever for cleaning grinders. Dick says the coffee-bean shaped tablet is made from “a proprietary formula of grains, cereals and pharmaceutical binders.” The product cleans the grinder without the user having to perform the time-consuming task of opening the grinder’s burrs, repositioning them and then getting them back to the right setting. “We found the right mix of all-natural and organic materials that, when ground up, would absorb the coffee oils caught between the burrs and also push out the particles that are left,” he says.

Kevin Lane, vice president of sales and marketing at Leodoro Coffee Systems, uses the Grindz product often as he sells and sets up equipment at coffeehouses. He says Grindz makes the life of the serviceperson a little easier. “In the old days, we used to have to go in and take the grinders apart and physically, like, with steel brushes, clean out the burrs and clean the rings around it,” he says. “What is now a 10 minute job service-wise used to be 45 minutes to an hour. So it saves a lot of time. They’re revolutionizing the way this industry is going.”

The chemical issue
Because most cleaning products are chemical based, there are safety issues to consider when using them on the machines. All of the products discussed above are either NSF registered and certified—meaning the National Sanitation Foundation has authorized that they are safe to use—or have received their Materials Safety Data Sheet, a report stating that the cleaner contains nothing toxic that will cross-contaminate any product it comes into contact with.

Pelo of JoeGlo says the company received its NSF certification, but he thinks the issue of chemicals is sometimes overblown. “I think there’s a lot of mythology, a lot of overthinking that,” he says. “It doesn’t leave any residue in there that you’re going to drink. I equate it to doing dishes and using dishwashing detergent. It rinses off, and it’s meant to rinse off.”

Dick of Urnex says that chemicals are a necessity to create some cleaning products, but safety regulations ensure that the products are fit for use on the machines. “When you’re trying to create a basic detergent, you need to use sort of detergent principles and properties,” he says. “We do work really hard to be as focused on the coffee environment but also find a way to get products that fit within all the right codes and regulations.”

CDCC Products’ Weaver echoes that sentiments, and he stresses that following directions closely is key to having a safe experience with chemical cleaning products. “It’s always an issue if you have chemicals if you don’t follow instructions,” says Weaver. “But we give very explicit instructions on all of our labels on the proper use.”

A long-term investment
There are many differences between the various cleaning products, but the purpose of each is ultimately the same: to protect coffee equipment. Weaver says that maintaining the equipment will also keep it looking better, encouraging customers to want to buy from you. “If it doesn’t appear to be clean on the outside, then chances are good that it’s not clean on the inside,” he says. “Properly cleaned equipment contributes to increased sales and a higher rate of return on their investment on that equipment.”

Pelo says daily cleaning also will directly affect the taste of the coffee. “It’s just so amazing when you actually taste something that’s not clean,” he says. “It’s basically the difference between really good stuff and really bad stuff.”

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