Sanitizing lots of bottles quickly

Hi all,

I'm in the final stages of putting together an 82l system, due to demand far outweighing my ability to supply!

But I still want to bottle - just makes drinking the stuff so much more flexible, plus I like to give it to friends etc. I have one of those excellent vinatore bottle rinsers, but here's my problem. My water is too hard for starsan (goes cloudy almost instantly), and in the UK DI water really isn't an option like it is in the states.

I've looked into bleach as a no rinse sanitizer, and like what I see (https://beerliever.com/bleach-no-rinse-sanitiser-home-brewing-beer/), but I'm not sure if this would work in a bottle rinser, or would require fully filling the bottles and leaving them for 30 seconds, which is obviously time consuming if you've gotta do 160+.

Any suggestions would be extremely welcome - what methods to 1bbl nanobreweries use, for instance?

Thanks a lot,
Iz

 

After a soak in PBW I load all of the bottles into the dishwasher and run a short wash cycle and a dry cycle. The dishwasher gets hot enough to sanitize, just make sure you aren't using any kind of soap. I can fit about 60 bottles at a time. Some people have also baked bottles in the oven to sanitize.

 

Your tap water must be very hard. The fact that your Starsan is cloudy doesn't diminish its effectiveness. It's the pH of the solution that makes it effective. If it's under pH 3, you are good to go. The cloudy appearance should not matter. Beerliever article notwithstanding, bleach is NOT a no-rinse sanitizer. Unless you want your beers to taste like bleach. Use Starsan. That article is giving bad advice. If you use bleach, you need to rinse.

Edit: If you want clearer Starsan solution you don't need DI water. Filtered reverse-osmosis (RO) water will work fine. You should be able to find that in the supermarket.

 

Read the bleach article. 80ppm chlorine, and it's mostly chlorine instead of hypochlorite because of the pH. Looks plausible to me. Your water is really hard so use a little extra vinegar. If your bottles are clean, just rinse and drain them with the Vinator and a drying rack.

Maybe try it with 10 or 12 bottles, and use Starsan with the rest of the batch; compare the results.

You can't buy RO water, but how about distilled water?

 

That's very interesting - I will get hold of some PH strips and do a proper test. Just did some follow up googling and it seems that actually if it goes cloudy instantly (as mine does) PH might be fine.

Re RO water, think that's what I meant, but not available in the UK either. Really hoping PH turns out to be OK - would save a lot of hassle just to be able to give a few pumps of the rinser.

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007ZD8TOY/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
I found it extremely hard to believe (read BS) that RO water wasn't available in UK.

 

Yeah totally agree that bleach needs to be rinsed thoroughly.

 

Which defeats the purpose of the bleach in the first place, as the rinse water may not be sanitary. The screen fitting on faucets is often the vector for microbe contamination.

 

An expensive filter is rather different to being able to pick it up at the supermarket...

 

There are quite a few acidified-bleach sanitizer threads here on HBT... The upshot seems to be, as long as you dilute the bleach properly (1 Tbsp bleach in 5G water) and then acidify with 1 tbsp acetic acid (distilled white vinegar) then you do indeed get a no-rinse sanitize w/ a 30 sec contact time.

This is according to the makers of Star San as cited in the linked blog post in the OP... (Charlie Talley on the Basic Brewing Podcast is the source skip to about 10:40 for the interview)

I've used bleach/vinegar a couple times with no issues, but I still like Star San, since the shelf life is longer...

 

Halfords sells 5l jugs of distilled water. Also available on Amazon.UK.

 

Quite. There's just no real culture of food-grade RO water in European supermarkets like there is in North America, certainly not on tap. You might get a RO unit in aquarium shops, or in some restaurants (units are sold to them as an eco thing so it tends to be the swankier ones; one might be open to a deal if you ask nicely), but it's just not a thing here. It's a specialist thing for car radiators and steam irons, and being specialist it's not cheap - for instance Halfords our biggest car parts chain sells "deionised" water for £3.50/5l, which is the equivalent of US$3.47 per US gallon. That gets expensive pretty quickly, certainly on a 0.5bbl brewlength. To be honest, once you start brewing on that scale, an inhouse RO unit is probably the best answer. Or move up north - the tap water is awesome up here!

In the meantime, you can do a bit better with some of the trade car places and in the car sections of supermarkets, but to be honest your best bet in the UK is mineral water. Look carefully at the labels of the own-brand ones, but for comparison Volvic is good, Evian isn't. I'd imagine most of the Scottish ones are pretty clean - it depends what you're wanting to brew but bearing in mind ppm is the same as mg/l, for most ales a mineral water that is <50mg/l Ca and <100mg/l Cl and SO4 and as little carbonate/bicarbonate/"hardness" as possible will give you something that's easy to adjust upwards. From memory Volvic is <15ppm for Ca/Cl/SO4, it's not far off Plzen - or Manchester.

 

I know I'm veering off-topic here, but I never realized that RO/DI water is not so prevalent in the UK. Very interesting and something I never would have guessed. I just assumed that it was a mass-marketing thing most anywhere. In US supermarkets, there is considerable shelf space devoted to the various 1 and 5 gallon jugs of RO and distilled water. Many stores also have bulk dispensing machines as well, with the water selling for around $0.30/gallon. In addition, you can find jugs of distilled water in the baby section, as it's popular for mixing formula.

 

found this article

 

Iodophor instead of Starsan?

 

If you just need to mix starsan for sanitizing bottles with a vinator, could you not just use bottled drinking water from the grocery store? Something like this should work https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/250634760 and if it doesn't it is not like you will be out too much money.

 

Yes, other cultures do things differently to the US....

It's a complicated story - the spa tradition in Europe meant that bottled mineral water was a thing there long before commercial RO was invented, and the variable quality of the municipal supply meant that there was reason to use it - I remember family holidays to rural France where I was told to brush my teeth in bottled water.

The UK, being both fairly compact and well supplied with rain, never needed bottled water in the same way, as it had a great municipal suppply - the high proportion of surface water means that the water outside the southeast is generally really soft - see eg the tap water at Cloudwater in Manchester - 9ppm Ca, 6ppm Cl, 9ppm SO4, overall hardness 1.925 Clarke (~28ppm CaCO3). If that''s what's coming out of your tap, then you have no need of bottled water - and the density of our population means that mains water is the norm, even in rural areas, whereas it seems a lot of USians are still on well water? In the 1980s the big European multinationals tried to create a "want" for bottled water, led by the likes of Perrier, and that's what you'll see on the shelves - but since it's a discretionary purchase the pitch is all about authenticity and terroir. RO doesn't really fit there.

On the other hand, there was a famous episode of a sitcom based around a con where tap water was sold as fancy mineral water and that continues to taint RO water, which is perceived as "fancy tapwater being sold for 100x the price of tapwater". Coke were the most famous victims of that when they tried to launch Denasi, mineralised RO water, in the UK. Although that was the least of their worries, they marketed it as "bottled spunk" in a jawdropping lack of awareness of British slang, and then it turned out that the process that created this fancy tapwater was adding carcinogens not present in the original tapwater.

So thanks to a sitcom and Coke, RO water is perceived as a rip-off that's full of bodily fluids and will give you cancer.

So it's not a big thing at retail level - it gets used in some "value" bottled waters like the Tesco one above, but in a way that the average consumer won't even notice.

 

Interesting story, thanks. Americans are enamored with its bottled water. Maybe it's better you don't have to deal with that, with all the plastic bottles wasted. I envy your soft water--wish I had a constant source that good. My city water is a couple hundred ppm hardness, with a fair amount of iron, too. Not good for brewing. For brewing water I have an RO system from Buckeye Hydro.

At least I don't have water like Flint, Michigan.

 

Meant to post back sooner, but forgot. I got some PH test strips and it seemed the starsan was bang on ph3, despite being a thick cloudy white.

Anyway, have used it now to sterilise bottles for many brews and have not had one infected bottle yet.