UV disinfection/pasteurizing

Does anyone have any information about pasteurizing home brewed soda using a UV lamp? I currently have a medical grade narrow band UVB lamp. I am wondering first of all if I can use it to render the yeast inert as well as kill off any other "bugs" that may be in the soda. If so how long would I have them exposed to the light to render the yeast inert to increase shelf life as well as reduce the likelyhood of soda bombs, when using sugar.

Thanks to everyone in advance

Is your soda in brown glass bottles, or any colored glass bottles by chance? The glass will block all but a tiny portion of the UV rays, leaving not enough to pasteurize anything. What about heat pasteurization?

Clear plastic bottles

Also blocks UV. You know those little backpacking water sterilizers (Steripen I believe) have to be dunked into the water to work.

Does the color of the bottle has much effect..?

A brown glass/plastic bottle will block more UV than clear. Some UV does get through, hence "skunked" beer in green bottles. Although nothing even close to the intensity required for pasteurization.

ColoHox said:

Also blocks UV. You know those little backpacking water sterilizers (Steripen I believe) have to be dunked into the water to work.

Click to expand...

No, UV will largely penetrate the clear plastic bottles. It's simply more effective to introduce the UV directly to the water in Steripen's case.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_disinfection for an example.

However, I don't know how well this will work on your yeast. If you had a microscope handy, you could test it.

We weren't discussing whether UV could penetrate, but if it can be used to pasteurize. It can penetrate, and has the effects I've already mentioned, in addition to the generation of reactive oxygen.

According to your source, clear water (which has a lower optical density than beer/soda and higher UV penetration) must be kept in full sunlight for 6 hours - 2 days, and just to kill diarrhea causing microbes. No one should do that to their beer/soda, and yeast is pretty tough.

I would still say though, that the OP's UVB lamp probably isn't going to cut it.

According to a response email I got from a uv disinfection system manufacturer, for water and waste treatment facilities, it isn't going to work for one reason. The root beer is not light transmissive enough. He stated that the fluid being treated will require the solution to transmit 75% of the uv to be effective. He also stated that soda/cola/root beer is going to only transmit about 25% of the uv. So to make a short story long, it's not going to work with the root beer I make.