Cleaning gunk in the bottom of bottles

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jfr1111

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I got a few cases of bombers from a friend of mine, but I have a hard time cleaning the gunk that sits in the bottom of a few of them*. Most are fine after a 8 hours bleach solution soak, but half a dozen of them still have that nasty brown smelly mold at the bottom. I went at the gunk with bleach, boiling water, a soft brush, a hard brush, vinegar and nothing works. I even yelled at it so it would be scared and slide off :D

Should I just pitch them and buy a dozen bottles of Unibroue instead ?

* One was so bad I didn't even try my hand at cleaning it. It had a moldy cigarette butt in it and smelled like a rancid skunk. Disgusting.
 
Bottle brush?
And Uni bottles are Belgian style and don't take a regular cap.
 
Yeah, but I would just cork and cage them (stylish...). Or I just hadn't thought about that :D

I actually wore down a bottle brush on them.
 
This is probably the next step, but it's hard to justify since I have 4 cases of clean Carlsberg bottles already and I'm only geared to do 3 or 4 gallon batches maximum anyway. Plus I'm a lazy SOB.

The bottles do look cool though and they don't have "Carlsberg" etched on them. If it wasn't for that logo, they would be near perfect since the labels almost fall off on their own, they are a breeze to clean and I don't mind green bottles (I won't be placing my bottles right next to a fluorescent light like at the grocery store).
 
I was gifted dozens of swing top litres from a commercial brewer. The had never been rinsed and sat outside in desert heat for a year. They had spiders, cigarette butts, gunk, fungus and who knows what. I mixed up a strong batch of Drano with warm water and let it steep overnight. Voila! They sparkled after a few rinses. Drano is sodium hydroxide, which is cheap, completely water soluble and any traces are neutralized by Star San. There are several commercially sold brewing equipment cleaners that use sodium hydroxide with a big price markup.
 
Muriatic Acid................which is dilute HCL. Put some of that and some water in the bottles. It'll eat that stuff right out. Diluted out it's harmless........ You can dump it down the drain (diluted). It's not strictly speaking "poison".....Just rinse with fresh water.

H.W.
 
Those bottles are long gone my friends (first post was from 2010...), altough for future reference, I ended up succeeding in cleaning all but a few of the very worst bottles by soaking them in a strong PBW solution for several days if I remember right.
 
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