How do I use a bottle washer?

I recently bought one of those bottle washers that you connect to your faucet and it shoots a jet stream of water into the bottle. The jet of water is supposed to wash away all the dirty stuff, but am I still supposed to use soap and a bottle brush before sanitizing?

For me, if the bottle doesn't have crud on the bottom and is clean to the eye, I just use the bottle washer to rinse out with hot water. Let the bottle drain, sanitize, and fill.

Bills Brew said:

For me, if the bottle doesn't have crud on the bottom and is clean to the eye, I just use the bottle washer to rinse out with hot water. Let the bottle drain, sanitize, and fill.

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+1. This will take 2 hours off your bottling day trying to do it any other way.

You only need to soak them if there's a lot of gunk inside the bottles or if you want to make it easier to remove the labels if they have any. I usually soak them at least briefly, blast them several times with the bottle washer to rinse, squirt some Star San in them with the vinator thingy and place them on the bottle tree ready for bottling. When cleaning very dirty bottles, which is a rare occurrence, I will blast them before the soaking and again to rinse.

That's pretty much what I figured, but I wanted to be safe and know for sure. I wouldn't want to bottle 5 gallons of beer just to have it go to waste from contamination. Thanks a lot everyone.

Want to do 2 things at once? Think your bottles might be dirty or have been sitting open for awhile on a shelf?

Load them up in the dishwasher, add about one half cup of bleach and run through a cycle... When they dry ---- give 'em a squirt of Star-San and bottle......

Clean bottles and a sterilized dishwasher!

I leave mine hooked up to my bar sink and as soon as I'm done pouring my beer, I rinse the bottle and place on my drying rack.
When dry I place upside down in a cardboard 12 pack and in my cabinet till I'm ready to sanitize and bottle.