How are you sanitizing your bottles?

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I have been using a Iodophor soak then drying but its messy and a general PITA.

I read in John Palmers "How to Brew" HERE about "baking" the bottles

Oven
Dry heat is less effective than steam for sanitizing and sterilizing, but many brewers use it. The best place to do dry heat sterilization is in your oven. To sterilize an item, refer to the following table for temperatures and times required.

Table 3 - Dry Heat Sterilization

Temperature Duration

338°F (170°C) 60 minutes

320°F (160°C) 120 minutes

302°F (150°C) 150 minutes

284°F (140°C) 180 minutes

250°F (121°C) 12 hours (Overnight)

The times indicated begin when the item has reached the indicated temperature. Although the durations seem long, remember this process kills all microorganisms, not just most as in sanitizing. To be sterilized, items need to be heat-proof at the given temperatures. Glass and metal items are prime candidates for heat sterilization.

Some homebrewers bake their bottles using this method and thus always have a supply of clean sterile bottles. The opening of the bottle can be covered with a piece of aluminum foil prior to heating to prevent contamination after cooling and during storage. They will remain sterile indefinitely if kept wrapped.

One note of caution: bottles made of soda lime glass are much more susceptible to thermal shock and breakage than those made of borosilicate glass and should be heated and cooled slowly (e.g. 5 °F per minute). You can assume all beer bottles are made of soda lime glass and that any glassware that says Pyrex or Kimax is made of borosilicate.
Click to expand...
 
There is a quicker oven method documented somewhere. Personally I just rinse well, wash in the dishwasher, and then soak them in a big bucket of starsan on bottling day. Empty starsan, no need to dry, and then fill.
 
Baking bottles seems very energy inefficient so it'll end up costing more than using iodophor or starsan as a sanitizer. It also takes more time and you run the risk of breaking your bottles. I dip mine in starsan then put them in a clean dishwasher(hole down) that's been misted with starsan. :)
 
You should note that this is for STERILIZING bottles not just SANITIZING them...

I follow the same method as McKBrew.
 
I agree with the above two. A good rinse and wash when the bottle is emptied, then a quick rinse/wash when it's time to bottle, a dunk in some iodophor and you're good to go. You don't want to fully dry the bottles with this or starsan. If the bottle is dry it's no longer being protected.
 
McKBrew said:
There is a quicker oven method documented somewhere. Personally I just rinse well, wash in the dishwasher, and then soak them in a big bucket of starsan on bottling day. Empty starsan, no need to dry, and then fill.
Click to expand...
that must be one big bucket to fit 50+ bottles :eek:
 
+1 to what everyone else has said. I rinse them to start, then soak them in a iodophor solution for about a minute, turn them upside down to drain for another half minute, then fill them. I've only had one infected batch in 28 so far, and I don't think it was the bottles. :cross:
 
I just rinse them out, a few shots from the Vinator with Star San and put them up on a sanitized bottle tree. Very fast and efficient.

If I have real dirty bottles, I fill them with an Oxy Clean solution for a day and then scrub if necessary. Then rinse really well and sanitize.
 
+1 on the dishwasher with the sanitizing cycle. Has worked great for me. The wet heat does a great job killing any micro-organisms.
 
I have a trash can full of oxyclean and after I pour a bottle I drop it right in there. When it gets full I rinse well with water and let them sit upside-down on an oven rack to dry. When bottling day comes I just use a bottle rinser to squirt a few pumps of sanitizer into the bottle then put it back on the oven rack until I'm ready to fill it. I know I might be running a risk because the sanitizer is only in brief contact with the bottle but it hasn't caused me any problems yet.
 
I bake my bottles but I think next time I'm going to try soaking them in one step (no dishwasher!). The only problem I've had was if a lil' fuzzy grew in the bottle between washing it out and baking. I didn't always catch it before the oven, resulting in bottles that smelled like death's butthole.

The search for a suitable keezer continues!
 
That oven method is terrible and an energy hog at that. Water (steam) transfers heat 100x more effectively than air. I use a huge pressure cooker that holds 15, 22 ounce bottles, and run at 15 psi for 15 minutes. Now that's how you sterilize. The world sterilize is misused, the correct word for what most people do is "sanitize".

You cannot achieve sterilization without putting said surfaces under pressure and achieving much higher temperatures than simple boiling will accomplish. Many endospores and microorganisms can resist boiling temperatures, hence why laboratories use autoclaves to effectively sterilize equipment.

And on the scientific level, all these sanitizers and methods that people use is a joke. If you understand the micro-climate, you would realize that most people get by because these brews take place in a C02 rich environment where most bacteria doesn't thrive, whether it be in the primary, secondary, bottle conditioning, or keg. In all reality the sanitizers may break up a few clusters of mold development here and there, but there are still probably 100,000 active spores and bacteria rods floating around in your brew or bottles at any given time.
 
I would agree with toppers, but at the same time it has worked so far, thus I'm not going to freak out and sterilize everything. Even with 100,000 mold spores it is not in good conditions for growth.
 
All I'm saying is that the oven method probably accomplishes the same as all these commercial sanitizers: just a little bit, which is good enough for this hobby I guess.
 
I do batches of 6 - 8 clean bottles. They go into the Star San, then after a couple minutes I put them on the sanitized bottle filling surface (like a chair or something), put 6-8 more in the Star San, fill the 1st set of bottles, cap, then repeat. Maybe it's just me, but I try to Star San everything right before using.
 

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