First Infection

Well, there it is. My first infected batch of beer. My cream stout has been in the bottle for just over 2 weeks and 2 days now, and all the flavors of the beer have been replaced by one big taste of clove. At this point I'd really just like to figure out what happened and how to avoid it in the future, but I'm also curious.. is it possible that beers with lactose are more likely to get infected because of the all the remaining sugar? I'm not sure if that's something that anyone has looked into.

I think this infection probably happened on bottling day, so I can probably narrow down the source to my bottling bucket, spigot, siphon tube, racking cane, or autosiphon. I can't remember for sure, but I think I wanted to mix in the priming sugar after I had already dumped my sanitizer and maybe used a not completely sanitary spoon to stir it in. Got careless because I've had good luck so far. Next bottling day though I'm going to be insanely anal about cleaning so I had a couple questions.

What kind of processes to people use to clean the items I listed above? For the most part I've been just using some hot water, and then running iodophor solution through everything. I haven't actually taken the spigot off because I worry it will wear out the seal on the bucket. Is there any harm in putting some of these items in the dishwasher? Thanks.

Edit: How do I make sure my bottles are totally clean before I use them again? I was thinking dishwasher and iodophor soak in no particular order.

I run my bottles through the dishwasher on the sanitize setting. Then I spray them with StarSan just before bottling (caps soak in it as well). Make sure everything that can come into contact with the beer is sanitized first. Overkill is not a bad thing in this case because you see the end result if not too careful.

Waunabeer said:

Overkill is not a bad thing in this case because you see the end result if not too careful.

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Yeah this has definitely been a wake-up call. I knew sanitizing was of the utmost importance but I always assumed there was some degree of paranoia behind it.