Sanitizing the beer thief

I just brewed my first batch two weeks ago. I plan to take a gravity reading tonight, and I am wondering how well I need to sanitize the beer thief. Will just a thorough rinsing with hot water be enough? Or do I need to mix up some sanitizer? I just bought iodophor, but the instructions are for at least a gallon of water. How much of it do I need to use to just make a few cups of no-rinse sanitizer?

Make a gallon and save it. Use what you need. I use a Wall Paper tray for longer items. Just toss others in the sani bucket.

Well, if my gravity stays the same until Sunday, i plan to bottle. Can I just make the solution in the bottling bucket? Will it still be effective? Will it do something to the plastic?

Yup. I usually use my bottling bucket to keep 6-7 gallons of StarSan mixed up. The BB is deep enough to get most stuff submerged.

BendBrewer said:

Make a gallon and save it. Use what you need. I use a Wall Paper tray for longer items. Just toss others in the sani bucket.

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Hey BendBrewer - How long will the iodophor/H2O mixture last and still be effective? I seem to have been wasting mine because I dump the mix each time I'm finished with sanitizing.

Found this nice article after a second of Googling...

http://www.bayareamashers.org/content/maindocs/iodophor.htm

Only a small sample...

Regarding iodophor that has been diluted to a working solution, Dr. Landman explained that there are a number of things that work to degrade the products' efficacy. Chlorine and protein load were the two mentioned first, but Dr. Landman agreed that both sunlight and exposure to the atmosphere may very well be factors. Iodophor is very stable in it's undiluted form, but will begin to degrade, (albeit slowly), once it has been diluted to a working solution. In either case, it is far more stable than chlorine which begins to degrade immediately upon being manufactured. The color of the iodophor solution is a rough guide to it's effectiveness as a sanitizer. If the solution still has its amber color, it is most likely still active. It is recommended that a fresh solution should be mixed when the color fades or after 24 hours.

I keep a spray bottle around with StarSan + Distilled H2O
..spray, spray, flick

I keep a spray bottle around of StarSan + regular water. I mix up a gallon or so every brew day, or when I'm bottling/kegging, etc. anyway so I figure there's no sense going nuts over distilled water. I just use some of what I make to fill up the spray bottle. It's still fine for a couple days of monitoring fermentation and whatnot, which is pretty much the only time I use the spray bottle when I DON'T make a sanitizing solution.

I use distilled (only for the spray bottle) because it keeps longer (months) and I'm always using the sprayer for corney connections, clamps, theif, bungs, spritz a valve before I open it .. you get it ... on brew days i use tap water in the bucket and beer in the brewer

vballdrummer said:

I use distilled (only for the spray bottle) because it keeps longer (months) and I'm always using the sprayer for corney connections, clamps, theif, bungs, spritz a valve before I open it .. you get it ... on brew days i use tap water in the bucket and beer in the brewer

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I do the same

BrewNow said:

Hey BendBrewer - How long will the iodophor/H2O mixture last and still be effective? I seem to have been wasting mine because I dump the mix each time I'm finished with sanitizing.

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I use Starsan and it lasts at least a month. Don't feel too bad. I used to waste it all the time too. Homer Buckets are cheap. Get 4 or 5 of them.