if you're having problems with soot accumulating on the bottom of your brew kettle this tip should help eliminate that hey brewers and beer lovers it's jake with superbrewers.com today i just wanted to take a chance to talk about something that i've seen going around on a few forums this week i and the problem that people are asking questions about is how can you prevent the black soot from accumulating on the bottom of your kettle and most of the discussion that i've seen is centered around well smeared dish soap on the bottom of your kettle so it's easier to clean after the fat and it doesn't really address the cause of the soot accumulating on the bottom of your kettle so the orange tops on those flames is the reason that you might be getting some blackness on the bottom of the kettle what that is is that's accumulating fuel earth that's unburned hydrocarbons that are sticking to the bottom of your kettle and then they're burning um and the way you can tell if that's happening on your burner is if the flames have this orange top that means that there's not enough air to allow all of the fuel to burn so what you want to do is on each um on your burner there should be some sort of dial on the end where the hose goes into the body of the burner and you're gonna wanna uh adjust that and what you do is you open it up so that more air goes in and as you can see as this opening becomes larger the flames on the burner are becoming more of a pure blue with less orange and you want to adjust it so that you are getting a pure blue flame on the bottom and only hints of orange occasionally so this mix is pretty good and the nice thing is once you have your mix adjusted correctly you can turn your burner off and it still works and you can turn it down and you're still gonna get a good mix so that will help keep the bottom of your kettle cleaner you won't need to scrub as much on with this banjo burner even when my mix isn't quite correct i still get right i don't get very much accumulation of soot on the bottom of my kettle i've seen it a lot more common with the um the other style burner with the more inexpensive turkey fryers where it's just like a smaller cup shape um and then the flames come out of that on those ones i i've had lots of problems using those at group rooming vents with soot accumulation on the bottom of the kettle hopefully it helps keep your kettle clean and makes home brewing more enjoyable grew up in adventure