Flip tops in the oven

RIT_Warrior · 12-05-2008, 03:51 AM

So I'm planning on bottling a brew, and I want to oven-sanitize my bottles. Problem is, some of the bottles I want to use are flip-tops (six clear glass IKEA bottles and 2 amber ones). I think the caps to these are plastic, how do you think they would hold up in the oven? Anyone done it before with success?

As a side note, the new Guinness bottles are awesome to bottle with. Widget can be removed with pliers, and label can be removed with a pocket knife. Only downside is that they aren't quite 12oz.

**zac** · 12-05-2008, 04:02 AM

I don't use the oven to sanitize, but I think you'd be ok as long as you took the gaskets off & just dunk them in a no rinse sanitizer of your choice.

I like the Guiness bottles too.

wreckinball9 · 12-05-2008, 01:09 PM

i dont bake my bottles either but i do use and love the ikea 1 liter flip tops. however, the seals on them dont seem to be as strong as a grolsch or other specialty bottles. i dont know if i would take them off and put them back on every time you bottle, nor would i risk baking them.

soaking the bottles for 1 minute in sanitizer solution is pretty easy, and i think most would recommend just sanitizing your bottles that way instead of baking.

RIT_Warrior · 12-06-2008, 12:26 AM

Well baking is great for non-flip tops at least because it sterilizes them, not sanitizes. It is also a hell of a lot easier to do with just one person then the starsan approach. Should I try the equipment/sanitizing forum? I'm kind of new to the forums, I wasn't sure whether to put it here or there.

Also, good to know that someone else uses the IKEA bottles, and thanks for warning me about the seals. I wonder if they would accept the grolsch style seals you can buy at a LHBS...?

**Yuri_Rage** · 12-06-2008, 12:30 AM

Baking is easier than this?

YouTube - Sanitizing bottles the easy way

**Duckfoot** · 12-06-2008, 02:55 PM

Amazing... Simply amazing.... or amazingly simple... What is that? A sprayer wand?

**Yuri_Rage** · 12-06-2008, 02:56 PM

It's a garden sprayer that has never been used for anything but Star San solution.

**Duckfoot** · 12-06-2008, 04:15 PM

That is what I thought...

RIT_Warrior · 12-07-2008, 07:29 PM

Well, I did a bit of digging on my own, for anyone who is interested. I found a table for the melting point of some plastics:

Comparison Table for Plastics.

and here is the table on how to oven sanitize:

How to Brew - By John Palmer - Sanitizing Your Equipment

So assuming the cap is made of some sort of Nylon (which I think is likely), I think I'll be in the clear. To test, I'm going to put 1 IKEA flip-top bottle in the oven with my regular 22oz and 12oz bottles and see how it goes.

As for the sprayer posted above, if I had something like that I probably wouldn't need to have this discussion

. But since I don't, the oven is really the easiest. You put foil over the top, put it in the oven at a set temperature for a couple of hours, and take it out when it is done. As long as the foil stays over the top, it is still sterilized (and that is actually sterilized, meaning there are no organisms at all), not just sanitized.

When I use star-san quite a bit of it ends up on the floor. Also, I do fear the foam on starsan, so I usually have to rinse the bottles out a bit before I trust putting beer in them. And yes I know that it isn't "really" sanitized if I don't rinse it off.

Ecnerwal · 12-07-2008, 09:36 PM

I'm a bottle baker, and have baked bottles of this type (well, they were actual grolsch bottles). I actually hadn't noticed that plastic had started to replace ceramic (ceramic tops bake just fine, with the gaskets off, of course). The plastic ones melted. I started just prying the whole bail assembly off the bottle for baking with the plastic tops - since then I've moved on to crown-capping.