Questions & Answers

It's all about the beer left behind at every clean. The Bio Fob holds just one-fifteenth of a pint, compared with the quarter-pint and half-pint chambers found in standard fobs. That much smaller chamber means far less beer is flushed away each time the lines are cleaned — a saving that quietly adds up across every clean, every line and every site in your estate.

Yes. Fobbing in the glass usually comes down to three things: beer that's too warm, incorrect gas pressures, or gassing caused by bacterial colonies growing inside the dispense lines. By keeping those colonies from taking hold, the Bio Fob removes that third cause — so you see noticeably less bacteria-driven gassing, and less fobbing in the glass.

As always, we'd recommend keeping your cellar and remote coolers running at the temperatures set by your technical department, so every part of the system is working at its best.

No. Every Bio Fob is flow-tested on 3 bar taps before it leaves us. The test automatically checks the flow rate with one tap open, then two, then all three at once — so you can be confident performance holds up even at your busiest moments.

Absolutely. There's nothing new to learn: your cleaning method and chemicals stay exactly as they are. Simply continue to follow the guidance from your technical department or chemical supplier, just as you do today.

You're quite right — ISO 22196 is a surface efficacy screen, not a full dispense trial. We use it as our material qualification: it proves, on a repeatable standard everyone recognises, that the polymer surface is genuinely antimicrobial, and to what degree.

From there, the real proof is in the pint. We've been trialling and testing in our own development cellar in Burton, and we're currently running live trials in a busy working pub across eleven different beers. We'd warmly welcome the chance to run a trial with you, so you can see the benefits and the savings for yourself.

It's independently verified, not a claim of our own. The figure comes from testing by IMSL under Certificate No. 1049737.119/18151, covering growth across a wide spectrum of bacteria including E. coli and S. aureus.

That laboratory result is backed up in the real world, too: our live testing in a working pub has shown minimal bacterial growth even after five weeks, with the lines still not at the point of needing a clean.

The active is a silver-based compound — a well-established, trusted antimicrobial. It complies with the relevant biocides legislation, which can include the Biocidal Products Regulation (BPR), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Reassuringly, the base polymer itself is the very same material already used in many of the fob floats found in cellars today.

No — and this is one of its real strengths. The active isn't a surface coating that can be scrubbed away; it's compounded right through the polymer. So as the surface gently abrades over time, fresh active is continually exposed underneath.

The insert is also designed to create a turbulent flow within the beer chamber that helps keep its own outer surface clean. All told, it's rated for a service life of ten to twenty years.

Yes — that's exactly what we're proposing. Because bacterial regrowth is held so much flatter between cleans, the beer poured on day twenty-eight stays remarkably close in quality to the beer poured on day one. That opens the door to longer intervals and fewer forced cleans.

Of course, any change to your cleaning schedule would always be your technical team's decision, made on your own data — and we'd expect it to be proven first through a validated trial.

Not at all — it's a deliberate, targeted approach. Bacterial growth is driven by temperature: in the python, kept below 6°C, bacteria take many days to divide, whereas in the warmer fob and drop line at around 12°C, they can divide in hours.

That warm fob chamber, where beer tends to stagnate at the top, is the real breeding ground — so that's exactly where we concentrate the protection. And our testing shows minimal growth in the pipework beyond the fobs.

Gladly — and we'd rather show you the numbers for your own estate than a generic headline. Take a look at our Line Cleaning Calculator, which sets out the volume of beer that can be saved for an individual pub or across a whole group.

It's a good question, and the answer is reassuring. The Bio Fob insert is designed to capture free yeast in the top of the fob chamber, keeping those particles from ending up in the customer's glass. So while you may see some deposit collecting there, it is only trapped free yeast — not bacteria.

And it's easily kept in check: your normal line clean, with your preferred chemicals, washes the inner chamber as usual, while the turbulent-flow design actively helps the cleaning process along.

No. The turbulence is contained entirely within the Bio Fob chamber, and it's actually a benefit — it helps the chamber's inner surfaces stay clean. In a standard fob, by contrast, the beer at the top of the chamber simply sits and stagnates, giving bacteria the perfect place to breed.

It behaves no differently to a standard fob and drop line, because that's essentially what it is — a direct, like-for-like replacement for your existing dispense equipment. The Bio Fob body is a standard dispense component manufactured by Tec-Flo.

Best of all, both the Bio Fob and Bio drop lines are 100% retrofit: fitting them needs no special tools and no special expertise.

Our patent pending protects three things at the heart of the design: the turbulent-flow insert, the reduced beer-chamber volume, and the use of antimicrobial polymers in the beer path.

We won't over-claim here — but we're genuinely optimistic. We believe Bio Fobs and Bio drop lines can dramatically reduce the chance of unwanted alcohol formation in no- and low-alcohol lines, and we'd welcome a working trial using non-alcoholic beers to prove it.

And if a particular product needs more, we can work with our bio-science partners to increase the active components in the Bio Fob and drop line to meet the specific challenges of non-alcoholic beers.

This is one of our newest developments, and the potential is exciting. Because every estate is different, we'd recommend working with your technical department to set up an active trial, so we can measure the real savings in your own conditions.

The amounts involved are genuinely small. Purging a single beer line uses only around 1 to 2 litres of beer gas (measured at atmospheric pressure) — to put that in perspective, a single pint of beer releases roughly 1.5 litres when it's poured at the bar. So the gas cost per line works out at about the same as the gas already in one pint.

For context on scale, a 20 kg CO₂ bottle releases somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000 litres of gas into the bar area over its life as beer is dispensed at the taps. Against that, a purge of just 1 to 2 litres per line is a very modest addition indeed.

It's already well beyond the drawing board. We've built working prototypes and trialled them in live cellars, capturing each line's cleaning profile and time-stamping the exact start and finish of every clean.

It's a compact electronic device, mounted close to the line cleaning pump, with a clear colour display and a LoRa radio MODBUS connection to our servers. Using a built-in flow meter, it measures — in real time — the flow of water and chemical mix from the 50 litre cleaning vessel as the lines are cleaned.

It works in two modes: passive and active. In passive mode it quietly monitors every clean in the background — recording start and finish times, the volumes and flow rates of both flushing water and chemical mix, and the number and length of each soak period. Together these build a unique cleaning profile for the line.

In active mode it becomes a helping hand for staff, with a large colour display that shows the days remaining until the next clean is due (green) or overdue (red). As the clean is carried out, the display guides the team through each step, showing the water or chemical used, the number of soaks and the times involved. That real cleaning profile is then sent to our server and compared against the ideal "company" profile — with the results available for the pub group to log in and review at any time.

Beer hygiene and quality matter enormously to pub groups — you invest real time and money in getting them right for your customers. Yet all of that good work rests on the person cleaning the lines on the day, and standards can quietly slip.

In one sample of ten pubs within a group, not a single site's cleaning interval or water usage came close to the company's own training standards — one pub even started a clean at 11:00pm and left the chemical soaking in the line until 9:00am the next morning. By keeping an eye on every clean, the Line Clean Manager makes sure your standards are actually met, every time — and the reward is the "Perfect Pint" for your customers.

Most cellars still identify their beer and gas pipes with coloured electrical tape running from keg to tap. Over time, though, that tape loses its grip and begins to unravel — and between spilt beer and cellar condensation, it soon looks tired and untidy in an otherwise well-kept cellar.

Our Technik2 ID markers solve that for good. Moulded from robust coloured plastic, they come in two sizes for standard 3/8" pipe: a single clip for one 3/8" pipe, and a twin clip for a pair of 3/8" drop lines.

Not at all — fitting couldn't be simpler. Each marker has an open side, so it simply pushes and snaps straight onto the pipe. There's no need to disconnect any pipework at all.

They come in all the familiar colours you'd expect from electrical tape — and for volume orders, we can mould them in any colour you like to match your own scheme.

Easily done — the coloured markers simply stack side by side to create any combination you need. A Guinness line might be marked black and white, for instance, or a non-alcoholic line green and blue.

No two cellars are the same — they vary in size and shape, sit above or below ground, and range from beautifully insulated to barely insulated at all. Yet the ideal parameters for keg beer storage and dispense really matter.

Too often, when something drifts — a remote cooler's ice bank creeping too warm, a top pump failing, or the cellar running consistently too hot — the first anyone knows of it is excess fobbing or hard-to-pour pints at the bar. By then it's too late: beer and time are lost tracking down the cause, or waiting for a cellar service visit the next day. A connected cellar keeps watch over all the key areas and raises the alarm the moment anything shifts from normal, so your on-site staff are alerted long before the problem ever reaches the bar — and starts costing money.

Our new range of Cellar Manager, Optimiser and Line Clean Manager all come with LoRa MODBUS communications built in, and a new universal device is coming soon that offers a combination of common industrial inputs. We're also about to switch on two-way control, so connected devices can have their set point changed remotely.

It's a real problem, and one we've solved with years of radio-communications experience behind us. Where the local GSM signal is weak, our own LoRa protocol simply jumps the data to a better spot — using our LoRa GSM SIMGATE devices to relay it from a poor-signal area to a stronger location elsewhere in the building.

And for the roughly 1% of sites where a postcode has no GSM signal at all, we can use an Ethernet-ported LoRa device to connect through the building's own Wi-Fi (subject to site approvals).

Almost anything you can think of. Using 0–10V and 4–20mA sensors, we can monitor beer-cooling and air-conditioning pressures, fridges and freezers, room temperature and humidity, heating and cooling plant, doors left open, and whole-site energy including power, gas and water.

Yes — and this is where it really earns its keep. In many cases we can monitor the duty cycle of the compressors in fridges, freezers and beer coolers, and by bringing in outside temperature and a little AI, we can spot when a compressor is being overworked or is heading towards failure — letting you act before it lets you down.

Yes — because you can't control what you don't monitor. When the heating or air conditioning is running flat out with doors propped open for hours, the connected cellar can automatically set those high-energy devices back, so nothing is wasted.

Down in the cellar, your group and staff are alerted to out-of-parameter events before any beer or time is lost, while preventative maintenance keeps running costs down and extends the working life of your equipment.