Are infected bottles savable?

[Grinder12000]

Well, the plan is to buy all new plastic for my bottling operation after 5 infected brews in a row.

The questions is - after pouring out the infected batches U have 4 cases of glass bottles.

Just clean and sanitize lie normal? Anything special I should do?

 

[k1v1116]

I would sterilize the bottles with heat since they are glass but if you're worried about it and dont want to use heat a strong bleach solution should sanitize and eat through any residue.

 

[beerocd]

I'd run em through the dishwasher on heavy duty cycle if your dishwasher does that - then wash em like normal with your favorite brewery cleaner, then sanitizer. Then I'd feel comfortable using them again.

-OCD

 

[zac]

I woulnt chuck them either.

Boil them, or bleachbomb them, whaever, but I woulnt destroy them.

 

[dantose]

bleach soak should do it. heat wouldn't be bad either, run them through the dishwasher maybe. If every bottle is infected, it isn't the bottles though. what's your fermentation vessel?

 

[KyleZ]

I am curious to what you did with the bottles and your results on this. I have had a streak of infected batches as well and think I have it pin pointed to the bottles at this point.

 

[starrfish]

I had a racking cane that was the culprit a while back...

 

[Sawdustguy]

Anything glass can be cleaned and sanitized.

 

[Catt22]

Anything glass can be cleaned and sanitized.

This has always been my understanding as well, but with some types of bacterial infections you may have to use high heat, ie autoclave or something similar. I would bake the bottles in an oven just to be sure, but I would not toss them out.

 

[KyleZ]

Thanks for your input I will give the oven a shot.

 

[hiberntepaths]

Yeah, you can definately save them. Bacteria is a living thing. What can live, can die. heh heh heh....

Bake em in an oven....seems like the easiest solution. You could also probably pour some kind of chemical in them to blast the little buggers... but you might not want to put that kind of thing in your bottles.

 

[Catt22]

Yeah, you can definately save them. Bacteria is a living thing. What can live, can die. heh heh heh....

Bake em in an oven....seems like the easiest solution. You could also probably pour some kind of chemical in them to blast the little buggers... but you might not want to put that kind of thing in your bottles.

Check out some information on the survival rate of bacterial spores for an eye opener on this subject. There is some evidence that bacterial spores can survive unprotected in space! Actually, that's probably how we got here in the first place.

High heat (oven or autoclave) should take care of anything we are likely to encounter, but chemicals might not.