Cleaning a washable hookah hose should usually involve nothing more than some water and some time. But, sometimes there is a flavor that absolutely refuses to leave and you need to break out the proton packs. There are a few different ways to bust that ghost, but one of the most popular is the lemon juice method. It’s really as simple as it seems.
Firstly, get some good lemon juice. You don’t need to juice your own, but the fresher the better and you don’t want to use anything with added sugar. Remember that sugar is food for microbes and one of the sure ways to kill a washable hose is to let it get moldy.
All you need to do is pour a little lemon juice in your hose and swish it around to make sure that every internal surface is covered. Then you let that sit for ten minutes in a way that the lemon juice won’t fall out and swish it around again. After another ten minutes it is time to rinse it all out.
From here you just follow your usual washing routine with clean water. The acid will have eaten through any build up on the inside of the hose a bit and loosened up the flavor particles that got left behind. Really pervasive flavors may still hang around a bit, but that should be covered up by the flavor of light lemon. For ghost of that power level there is nothing left to do beyond letting it fade naturally and smoking flavors that will overpower it. I like to follow up a lemon juice cleaning with a strong mint because they taste great together and mint has Egon level Ghostbuster skills on its own.