Nasty Looking Bottles

Hey all-

A friend of mine just gave me about 60 bottles, which is about a 25 percent increase from what I have now. The bad thing is that when I took the bottles out to wash them, there was mold growing inside of most of them, implying that he did not wash the bottles after drinking. One had a dead spider...yum. Is it worth bleaching the bottles? I really don't like the idea of my beer conditioning in bottles that were moldy.

Any input?

If you bleach them, they'll be spotless. Get some gloves and go to work!

A while back there was a used bottle thread with a lot of horror stories on cleaning used bottles. You can get just about any bottle clean with a long enough soak in bleach or something like Straight A.

I'd probably never object to free bottles from a friend. But I'd rather buy new bottles than clean gunky ones.

I would get the largest container I could find and soak them for a day. They should come clean. I don't usually use bleach but for something like this I probably would.

I had some bottles like you're talking about. I soaked them in hot water, cut the handle off a bottle brush and attached it to my cordless drill. Cleaned them clean as can be.

I use my drill also.

The overnight soak in bleach water would be the best.

They will clean up fine. A friend gave me a couple of carboys he had laying around in the celler, one of which had 2 dead mice in it. Took awhile but they a clean as new.