ethanol as a sterilizer?

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stillbrewin

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Just curious if anyone knows what effect ethynol would have as a sterilizer. I am talking 95.6% pure basically as pure as you can get without azotropic distillation. Obviously it would not be cost effective on a large scale but for small parts would it sterilize not just sanitize?
 
It would sterilize the surface contacted, but then the air would instantly contaminate it. Pretty effective as a surface disinfectant, which is why it is used so heavily in microbiological settings.
 
Works great, but it should be diluted to 70%. Otherwise it evaporates too quickly to kill microbes effectively. In the lab we routinely use 70% ethanol for sterile applications.
 
Like ipsiad said, it works great as a sterilizer, but it evaporates so quickly that you risk recontamination before you're ready to use whatever you sterilized.
 
Misplaced Canuck - sanitizers like iodophor and star-san stay wet for quite a while and are effective until they dry. Something like alcohol evaporates almost immediately, and is prohibitively expensive too. Ethanol works great for yeast propagation, but once you start dealing with whole batches of beer, it stops making sense.
 

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