Bottle cleaning

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Beaunine

Beaunine

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So I'm new to this whole brewing thing but I'm hooked! My question is when cleaning bottles for reuse what is the easiest way? I'm currently hand washing and I'm slow as can be. Is there a certain detergent to use? I'm just using dawn and following it up with sanitizer but it seems to be taking forever! I have also been drinking so I might be a little slower too.
 
Beaunine said:
So I'm new to this whole brewing thing but I'm hooked! My question is when cleaning bottles for reuse what is the easiest way? I'm currently hand washing and I'm slow as can be. Is there a certain detergent to use? I'm just using dawn and following it up with sanitizer but it seems to be taking forever! I have also been drinking so I might be a little slower too.
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I would say soak the bottles in a proper star san solution for ~2 days, it will soften things up and take off labels. I little scrubby scrub with a brush doesn't hurt either. As you finish each bottle make sure it's rinsed out well in the next day or two after consumption, also maybe doing 10-20 bottles to day will make it seem easier.
 
Scruffy1207 said:
I would say soak the bottles in a proper star san solution for ~2 days, it will soften things up and take off labels. I little scrubby scrub with a brush doesn't hurt either. As you finish each bottle make sure it's rinsed out well in the next day or two after consumption, also maybe doing 10-20 bottles to day will make it seem easier.
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My problem is that I don't like waste and it seems that I'm using too much water to get the suds out of the bottle it has taken me 20 minutes to get 8 bottles clean
 
Beaunine said:
My problem is that I don't like waste and it seems that I'm using too much water to get the suds out of the bottle it has taken me 20 minutes to get 8 bottles clean
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Take a bath before you go to bed throw your bottles in the bath water over night :) lol make sure that you sanitize thoroughly.
 
Get a bottle tree and a jet bottle washer. You can just sanitize when you get ready to bottle. I use a vinator bottle rinser that works great for sanitizing. This will help with your need to be green.
 
I use a $5 orange 5G bucket from home cheapo with a lid. It'll hold 12 bottles upright,& I put in enough PBW solution to cover the bottles by 2" or so. Let'em soak overnight,& the labels & glue slip right off. Including any moldy gunk in the bottom of the bottles. Just in case some weren't rinsed out before hand.
I use a bottle brush & dobie to clean them off real quick inside & out. Then hang'em on my 45 bottle tree. It's the easiest way to clean'em. I've been going through a mountain of bottles we saved up between the 3 of us for some 5 weeks now. Maybe another week,& I'll have enough bottles for 4-5 batches,including my cooper's PET bottles. I've been doing all those bottles without breaking a sweat,or bustin my hump.:mug:
 
unionrdr said:
I use a $5 orange 5G bucket from home cheapo with a lid. It'll hold 12 bottles upright,& I put in enough PBW solution to cover the bottles by 2" or so. Let'em soak overnight,& the labels & glue slip right off. Including any moldy gunk in the bottom of the bottles. Just in case some weren't rinsed out before hand.
I use a bottle brush & dobie to clean them off real quick inside & out. Then hang'em on my 45 bottle tree. It's the easiest way to clean'em. I've been going through a mountain of bottles we saved up between the 3 of us for some 5 weeks now. Maybe another week,& I'll have enough bottles for 4-5 batches,including my cooper's PET bottles. I've been doing all those bottles without breaking a sweat,or bustin my hump.:mug:
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You're lovely lady's hump
 
I'm only six batches into home brewing but I find I was spending too much time on bottles. For the last few batches, I've just rinsed the bottles with hot water as soon as I've drunk from them or poured them into a glass (whether store-bought or my previous batches) and then they sit in my back room until I'm ready to use them. No soap; no brush. When I'm ready to use them, they get a 3-5 minute soak in Iodophor and then get placed on a towel next to my bottling bucket. I haven't had any problems with off tastes, &c.

My $0.02.
 
Five people have already said it.

Rinse with tap water the minute you first pour the beer. Then sanitize right before bottling. Voila.
 
So... Maybe I'm a dunce, or just searching the wrong terms.... But I want to know the best way to clean out OLD bottles. I got 5+ cases on craigslist from another local home brewer and I soaked his labels off with pbw and easy clean. I did 11/2 cases with each product. So far my opinion is that the easy clean... Is not so easy. I still have deposits in many of the bottles. The bottles must have been in this dudes basement for YEARS, and his brilliant method of storage was to rinse the bottles then store them filled with water. So now I'm faced with the task of trying to get mineral deposits out of 15 yr old bottles. I don't really have the time or energy to use the bottle brush on each one... I might throw them all away if I have to do that and start over with fresh clean bottles from my lhbs. I ran out of PBW and want to know if that is the best one out there. Is oxy-clean compariable or do I need to just shell out the big bucks? I assume that my soak needs to be longer and hotter... Then they might come out as clean as new. Help me please... I'm too trusting and need to stay away from craigslist, I really like shiny new things and the stuff I got recently was neither shiny or new.... So I need to redeem myself and make these bottles usable.
 
tesilential said:
Five people have already said it.

Rinse with tap water the minute you first pour the beer. Then sanitize right before bottling. Voila.
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THIS.

For the initial cleaning, I just fill the sink with hot tap water and dump in 1/2 cup or so of PBW. This will do 18 bottles at a time. Leave them in an hour, and most labels slip right off, or have floated off. Meanwhile, the PBW has cleaned everything. For successive use, see quote above. I use a vinator with Star San to sanitize the inside, then a trip through the dishwasher. Overkill, perhaps, but that's what I do.
 
mcbethenstein said:
So... Maybe I'm a dunce, or just searching the wrong terms.... But I want to know the best way to clean out OLD bottles. I got 5+ cases on craigslist from another local home brewer and I soaked his labels off with pbw and easy clean. I did 11/2 cases with each product. So far my opinion is that the easy clean... Is not so easy. I still have deposits in many of the bottles. The bottles must have been in this dudes basement for YEARS, and his brilliant method of storage was to rinse the bottles then store them filled with water. So now I'm faced with the task of trying to get mineral deposits out of 15 yr old bottles. I don't really have the time or energy to use the bottle brush on each one... I might throw them all away if I have to do that and start over with fresh clean bottles from my lhbs. I ran out of PBW and want to know if that is the best one out there. Is oxy-clean compariable or do I need to just shell out the big bucks? I assume that my soak needs to be longer and hotter... Then they might come out as clean as new. Help me please... I'm too trusting and need to stay away from craigslist, I really like shiny new things and the stuff I got recently was neither shiny or new.... So I need to redeem myself and make these bottles usable.
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Soaking in an acid solution is probably your best bet for the mineral deposits -either a strong vinegar solution or StarSan. For removing labels, OxiClean or the cheap stuff from WalMart (Sun brand ?) works well, but can leave a white film on the bottles, if you have hard water,. Soaking with vinegar or StarSan should remove this. It seems that the PBW is less likely to leave a film, but is expensive. Some people claim that you can make your own PBW from OxiClean and TSP/90 (not the regular TSP) which can be obtained at Ace Hardware. I have heard ratios of 70/30 and 60/40 OxiClean/TSP90. I haven't tried it, but some people say it works.
 
I bought a bunch of used botles from a guy that had them laying around for years. He inherited them, dumped the homebrew out, then stored them without washing. Thick black gunk developed on the bottom that a bottling brush couldn't handle.

Put them in a cooler, a dash of Oxiclean in each bottle, filled up with scalding hot water and closed the lid of the cooler. Next morning the water was still prety warm and the bottles were clean. Gave them each a good rince, a brush and sanitize. From then on they get a rince when they're poured, then a rince and sanitize before bottling again.
 
There will be two kinds of deposits in bottles:

1. Organic deposits: bugs, any other animal or vegetable matter or their residues that happend to get in there and get stuck. The most likely suspect, of course, is dried beer / yeast that wasn't rinsed out when the beer was poured. For these, the easiest thing is an oxygen cleaner. Oxi-Clean is the most common, but there are a number of brands. PBW by Five Star rules. It's more expensive, but I use it, because it has chelators that enable it to work better in our extremely hard well water.

2. Inorganic deposits: some kind of mineral, the most common by far will be iron & calcium or a combination. No matter what, an acid like vinegar should remove it. If it doesn't, a product like Iron Out, Simple Green, CLR, etc. should do.
 
Dang,I forgot all about CLR. That's great stuff for mineral & various hard deposits in irons,coffee machines,etc. That might just do it. But I'd be hard pressed to find something that PBW can't get clean. It's just all around great stuff. I've been saving those snap lid plastic trays from the Chinese carry-out. Great for saving spent steeping grains. I'm gunna try putting all my hop socks in one,& cover them with PBW to see if I can soak the stains out. Those white ales can sure make some serious stains.
 
Well, here's the update. After a trip to my LHBS on my morning off to pick up some more PBW, I figured out what to do. Since I already had the labels off (PBW and easy clean) I prepared 3 large rubbermaid tubs filled with star san. I've never used it before, only bleach and iodaphor, so I didn't know it was a hard core acid. Some bottles were pretty clean after the PBW, but many still had the layers of minerals... I plan to empty the bottles and prep them for storage tonight, but the few I checked before I left for work were almost spotless. Just a little more time and patience, and I just might redeem myself yet!
 
Another thing I have done is make the scrubbing fun. I took my bottle brush, cut off the top loop and mounted it in my wife's portable kitchen drill. It is a lame B&D drill, but it spins that brush just right. I soak, then insert brush and give it a go. It has worked great for me.
 
I don't know about cleaning because I rinse all bottles thoroughly right after I drink or pour from them but I threw a few scoops of OxyClean into a bathtub full of water, threw a couple cases of bottles in there and a few hours later the labels had fallen off. I just rinsed and let them sit out to dry. Worked like a charm.
 
I'm just starting to need the cases full of empties that have been in my basement now. Unbeknownst to me my friends don't all rinse them when they save them for me so I ended up with at least 5 cases of nastiness lol. I took all 5 cases up to the bathroom, put them in the bathtub and added some target brand oxyclean. Let them soak for about 2 hours, labels came right off and I gave each one a quick rinse as I emptied the tub. Took a little bit of time but then I had 5 cases that only needed sanitizing when it was time to bottle. And I didn't use as much waste water by doing them all at once.
 

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