How Anal should I be about Sanitization?

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bockman

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Today I bottled my first batch of beer and find myself worrying about contamination. Not so much from brew day, but today, while clumsily racking to the bottling bucket I know parts of the tubing touched unsanitized surfaces then was submerged into the beer. Also after sanitizing them in an iodine solution and rinsing with tap water, I set the bottling equipment on a clean, but unsanitized table cloth until they were needed.

Am I being a "worry-wort" (no pun intended), or are tap water, unsanitized counter tops, or an unsanitized clean table cloth legitimate things to worry about?

Brewing was fun. I can't wait to reap the fruit of my labors.
 
You'll probably be fine. Don't worry.
FWIW I usually sanitize a large cookie tray and
put hoses and stuff in that during staging.
 
People have been making beer longer than people have known about microbes. Not a little longer. A lot longer. In fact, people have only known about yeast for a few hundred years.

Do your best and RDWHAHB. If making beer were so dangerous, all the beer drinkers would have Darwined themselves out of here thousands of years ago.
 
The habit I've gotten in is:

A) go to Home Depot and get aHomer bucket (big, plastic & orange...just a few bucks).

B) come brewday, fill aforementioned bucket with water & sanitizer.

C) have at it.
 
IMHO, you should be as anal about sanitation as you can let yourself be without going crazy or making brewing something that's not fun. If you're a slob like me, that means washing everything when you finish with it, rinsing it off before using it again and giving it a spray with starsan. If you're totally OCD and you ENJOY making everything sterile... knock yourself out.
 
+10 to A homer bucket or its bastard step child from lowes also hdpe 2

Don't forget the lids. Starsan made with distilled will keep for multi-brew sessions.
 
Sanitation is important, but you should not devote 95% of your worrying to it. Get into a good sanitation routine and don't spend another minute worrying about it. What you SHOULD worry about, in my experience, is fermentation temperature. Keep that bad boy as close to 65 degrees (internal temperature) as possible.

For my first two batches I was so worried about sanitation, oxidation, and other piddly crap that I completely overlooked my fermentation temperatures. Now I have to drink some slightly eatery beer with a hard alcohol bite while waiting for me next batches.

I didn't mean to hijack the thread, but I felt it was important to express my belief that there are things that SHOULD be highly stressed, and other things that you shouldn't lose any sleep over.
 
Also after sanitizing them in an iodine solution and rinsing with tap water, I set the bottling equipment on a clean, but unsanitized table cloth until they were needed.

Double check the instructions on the bottle of your sanitizer. Mixed at the proper ratio, iodophor should be a no-rinse sanitizer. A benefit of this is that if the piece of equipment that you're sanitizing is still wet with the solution the sanitizer is still actively working.
 
I agree with HickoryMike.

Sanitation is very important but there are other things that will change the taste of your beer much faster. Fermentation temperature being the most apparent in my experience as well.

I recently brewed a sweet stout and while trying to get the last amount of wort goodness into the fermentor I bumped into one of the gas stove grates I set my hot brew pot on to prepare for chilling. The whole thing fell into the fermentor. I then proceeded to dunk my whole arm into the wort and with cat like reflexes (some would even say ninja like) removed the iron. Took a gravity reading the other day with a small taste test and the beer is gonna come out fine.

It also really helps to get a solution of water and sanitizer in a spray bottle for the moments when you need sanitation on the go.
:mug:
 
Things to watch out for are spigots and bottling buckets - I feel that while you should be clean pre batch the important time is post batch when you THINK you are all done but there is now wort sugar everywhere. Make sure you clean everything right away.
 
Wow! Thanks for all the replies.
It's quite a revelation to me just how many home brewers there are out there.
Now that my first batch is in bottles, my brew kit is idle. I need to start batch #2!

Cheers!
 
I have two buckets on hand whenever I handle my beer (brew day, racking, bottling, etc). One is filled with a sanitizing solution, and one is full of clean water (of course, both buckets are sanitized before using). I just keep my equipment like thermometers, hydrometers, and tubes in the sanitized bucket. If I need something, I grab it out of the sanitizer, rinse it in the clean water bucket, and it should be pretty safe.

Of course, I'm a new brewer and the experts on this board might have other opinions, but this method is easy and works for me.
 
Several good replies. I believe in sanitizing anything that touches the wort/beer post boil. I gets easier. Trust me. I finally broke down and got a bottling bucket. I think it was Revvy that has a picture of just having the filler connected pretty much to the bucket? I had to use a few inches of hose. VERY NICE. You don't have to worry about putting the thing down or have excess hose flopping around.

+1 on extra buckets
+1 on no rinse sanitizer
+1 on keeping one of those buckets full of Starsan.

I bought a wall paper tray but find myself using the bucket more and more. The "Ace Hardware" seems sturdier than the 'large chain stores', at least the ones I saw.

I'm pretty new, but trust me, you get YOUR process worked out and it gets a lot easier.
 
You can kill yourself worrying about these things. Just do this when you get an infection and just replace all that equipment. I use hot hot dishwasher water to clean bottles and nothing else (I have gotten bottle caps to float on the head).

But when you brew if everytime you pull out another ladle or knife or whatever you'll worry yourself to death.
 
Along the same lines, I was curious about sanitation as it relates to dryhopping. From what I've read, dry-hopping is adding hops after the boil has finished, or at least very near the end (or else I'm getting it confused and dryhopping is adding hops in a secondary ferment) which makes my question even more pertinent.

If you're putting plant life - hops - into your beer, isn't that begging for some kind of sanitary consideration? I'm fairly sure no one starsan's their bag of hops....umm.. right?
 
Here's my take on sanitizing:

The key is to ensure your yeast can outcompete everything else for food supplies, to make beer that tastes good, instead of beer that tastes off.

The key is to be as good as you can about sanitizing, so small mistakes like tubing touching unsanitized surfaces don't kill your beer.

I try to be as sanitary as possible, but I have been known to sanitize my arm and reach into a boiler full of cooled wort to unclog a plugged diptube.

Worry about the stuff you can control, remember Revvy's advice about beer being pretty hardy, and don't sweat the petty stuff (or pet the sweaty stuff, either. At least not while you're brewing.) The worst thing that can happen is you make beer that tastes like Satan's taint and you spend $40 in ingredients on a lesson in sanitizing.
 
Just soak EVERYTHING that touches your beer after the boil in a sanitizing solution, but before that, screw it.
 
my habits are sanitizer use clean sanitizer store repeat Ill sanitizer the day of.. then quernetnie
 
my habits are sanitizer use clean sanitizer store repeat Ill sanitizer the day of.. then quernetnie

i-am-lost.jpg
 
The habit I've gotten in is:

A) go to Home Depot and get aHomer bucket (big, plastic & orange...just a few bucks).

B) come brewday, fill aforementioned bucket with water & sanitizer.

C) have at it.
I do something similar.. But I use one of those bins that they use to bus tables at restaurants. Everything I have (except the auto siphon) fits in there.
 
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