Bleach for sanitation??

[jfr1111]

Typo? 1 oz = 29.6 mL.

Also, a tablespoon is exactly 1/2 oz, so 2 tablespoons is spot on.

When I've used bleach, I've never bothered measuring. I just pour in an eyeballed amount. I've used this for cleaning bottles a few times and I've never had any ill effects at all after rinsing (and re-sanitizing with SaniClean). Certainly no off flavors.



If it has any effect on the beer after rinsing, you didn't rinse well enough (unless you mean by not sanitizing adequately if you rely on it solely for that).

Ooops. Typo. A tablespoon is 29,6ml. Listen to the podcast. Household bleach is engineered to whiten our laundry, not kill mold and wild yeast. When people "bleach bomb" their equipment by simply pouring in bleach and adding water afterward, they have the sentiment that they are killing everything because it smells nasty and everything turns white. Wrong. What you're doing is basically adding an unecessary step to your process and wasting a lot of water rinsing. It's not hurting anything, but it sure isn't accomplishing a whole lot either.

Clean using a mild detergent (oxyclean for example) and mild scrubbing and then sanitize. Even just scrubbing in hot water is often enough unless you let your equipment cake and get nasty after usage. Bleach is not a detergent and it is a poor sanitizer, unless its pH is lowered. StarSan is supposedly one step (detergent + sanitizer), at least according to Charlie Telley in the podcast.

Thre only time I have picked up an infection is when I started "cleaning" my vinyl tubes by letting them soak in a strong unacidified bleach solution. Sure enough, some organic matter had stayed in the tube and created a hospitable habitat for wild yeast.

 

[Gduck]

Do you have marble countertops? Mine are formica ( I think, wood with a veneer) and spilled a couple drops of full strength StarSan on it.. now I am stuck with a couple white stains etched on a dark green counter. Have found nothing to remove it.

Our kitchen is a relic. Cheap laminate of some kind. If we were planning on living here more than a couple more years we would be looking in to gutting the kitchen.

So whatever my countertops are the Star San has never stained. However some concentrated Star San get on a pocket knife of mine and the blade has some funky discoloration now.

 

[Wynne-R]

A US ounce is 29.6 ml, 28.4 Imperial.

I wonder about the bleach vinegar solution. I think the idea is that the bleach will raise the pH and the vinegar will lower it back. The thing that bumps me is that there is no way that’s going to work in tap water. Charlie must have been using DI water. Otherwise the resultant pH would be over a very wide range, depending on the water.

I don’t think it’s worth it to screw around with something that can wreck your beer in tiny amounts.

 

[TequilaMockingbird]

In the UK I can recommend Chemipro-Oxi. Quick, eay and no need to rinse (although I invariably do).

 

[jfr1111]

A US ounce is 29.6 ml, 28.4 Imperial.

I wonder about the bleach vinegar solution. I think the idea is that the bleach will raise the pH and the vinegar will lower it back. The thing that bumps me is that there is no way that’s going to work in tap water. Charlie must have been using DI water. Otherwise the resultant pH would be over a very wide range, depending on the water.

I don’t think it’s worth it to screw around with something that can wreck your beer in tiny amounts.

Nowhere in the podcast does he mentions using DI water. You might be onto something regarding the pH of tap water, but StarSan also works by lowering the pH of the water/sanitizer solution below a certain level (3 in this case) and I'm sure nobody uses StarSan with DI water. I'd wager that the vast majority of tap water doesn't contain enough buffering capabilities to really hinder the capacity of the vinegar to acidify the solution. Charlie Telley was thorough enough (he talks for about 15 minutes about using bleach) that if he wanted people to use DI water, he would've mentionned it.

 

[jfr1111]

In the UK I can recommend Chemipro-Oxi. Quick, eay and no need to rinse (although I invariably do).

No rinse sanitizers are not supposed to be rinsed after usage. I very much doubt the tap water coming from your kitchen sink is sterile. No rinse means no rinse. You can (and invariably do) introduce back micro organisms on your equipment by doing so. Even using boiled and cooled water is spiffy at best. On the other hand, not all wild yeast or mold can survive the rigors of living in beer and only a fraction of what "floats" or "squirms" around can spoil beer, so if it works...

 

[Wynne-R]

Jfr1111 I listened to the podcast too, but it’s been a while. I came up with the DI theory, because it’s the only way I could figure out that a smart guy like Charlie would say something dumb. I think he used DI because that’s what he had, and it never occurred to him that other people would use a whole range of different waters.

He did say when your StarSan solution gets cloudy, throw it out. It gets cloudy when the detergent reacts with the impurities in the water. I take that to mean it would be a real good idea to mix it up with soft water. It doesn’t need to be DI, it could be distilled or RO. I do that, lots of people do.

Just for fun, I ran an informal experiment. I put a teaspoon of vinegar in a half cup of tapwater, pH 3.75. With RO water, it was 3.05. Big difference.

 

[jfr1111]

Jfr1111 I listened to the podcast too, but it’s been a while. I came up with the DI theory, because it’s the only way I could figure out that a smart guy like Charlie would say something dumb. I think he used DI because that’s what he had, and it never occurred to him that other people would use a whole range of different waters.

He did say when your StarSan solution gets cloudy, throw it out. It gets cloudy when the detergent reacts with the impurities in the water. I take that to mean it would be a real good idea to mix it up with soft water. It doesn’t need to be DI, it could be distilled or RO. I do that, lots of people do.

Just for fun, I ran an informal experiment. I put a teaspoon of vinegar in a half cup of tapwater, pH 3.75. With RO water, it was 3.05. Big difference.

I think you're overthinking this by a good margin. He did say that all the major breweries use chlorine at 5 part per million at a pH around 3.5 on their bottling lines, if I remember right. At 80 part per million, which is the concentration achieved with the method outlined above, it's safe to speculate that there's a lot of leeway for tap water's diverging pH. He did say it was very important to choose the cheapest bleach possible to guard against caustic not allowing the pH to drop enough and to check the bleach for cloudyness/freshness every so often,so, in my mind, these are the two determining factors in insuring optimal performance.

And again, StarSan needs an even lower pH to be effective: if it doesn't go below 3, it must be discarded. But what if someone has a ridiculously high tap water pH ? Nowhere on the bottle is it written to use with RO or DI water. It doesn't say to increase usage. It just says 1oz for 5 gallons.

StarSan is superior in every way, that I can give you, but bleach can work in a pinch too. A lot of other practices carry minimal infection risks but are still touted as okay.

 

[Wynne-R]

I did find this: http://chemistry.about.com/b/2012/02/01/why-people-mix-bleach-and-vinegar.htm

Apparently Charlie was increasing the oxidation potential without increasing the bleach. He was using sodium hypochlorite at 82 ppm, acetic acid 47 ppm. So I thought I would try my experiment again at the lower level of vinegar. I used three drops into 500ml instead of a teaspoon. Tapwater 7.05, RO 4.40.

That’s what a buffer does.

The reason StarSan works in hard water is that there’s enough phosphoric acid in there to bust out of the buffer. Last time I checked my diluted StarSan was pH 1.65.

I wish we could ask Charlie, but the last email I sent to Five Star was not answered.

 

[zeg]

Ooops. Typo. A tablespoon is 29,6ml. Listen to the podcast. Household bleach is engineered to whiten our laundry, not kill mold and wild yeast. When people "bleach bomb" their equipment by simply pouring in bleach and adding water afterward, they have the sentiment that they are killing everything because it smells nasty and everything turns white. Wrong. What you're doing is basically adding an unecessary step to your process and wasting a lot of water rinsing. It's not hurting anything, but it sure isn't accomplishing a whole lot either.

I'm extremely skeptical of this claim. (Though I didn't listen to the podcast, sorry, audio formats annoy me.) The CDC recommends the use of diluted bleach for disinfection of surfaces (http://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/disinfection_sterilization/6_0disinfection.html). It's recommended for cleanup of mold and mildew by the Colorado State Extension (e.g., http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/columncc/cc0802.html). The evidence I can find quite uniformly indicates that bleach is an effective, broad-spectrum disinfectant (and on par with or broader spectrum than acid-based disinfectants).

I guess it's possible that in this specific venue there's a problem with it, and maybe your podcast covers this. But I don't think you can justify the claim that you're doing "nothing."

 

[jfr1111]

I'm extremely skeptical of this claim. (Though I didn't listen to the podcast, sorry, audio formats annoy me.) The CDC recommends the use of diluted bleach for disinfection of surfaces (http://www.cdc.gov/hicpac/disinfection_sterilization/6_0disinfection.html). It's recommended for cleanup of mold and mildew by the Colorado State Extension (e.g., http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/columncc/cc0802.html). The evidence I can find quite uniformly indicates that bleach is an effective, broad-spectrum disinfectant (and on par with or broader spectrum than acid-based disinfectants).

I guess it's possible that in this specific venue there's a problem with it, and maybe your podcast covers this. But I don't think you can justify the claim that you're doing "nothing."

Sorry if the audio format annoys you, but it's clearly explained in the podcast.

And as far as the buffering qualities of water go, that's quite a discrepancy ! I listened to the podcast (again!) and there are no mentions of using RO or DI water. Maybe it was a mistake on his part. Maybe he told himself "that's good enough for homebrew applications". Maybe he "improvised" that part of the interview and didn't think it through. I don't know. He did not say which pH you should be targetting after acidification either.

What I do know is that all of my beers (except one) have been shelf stable without off-flavours after bottling and using the acidified bleach method. Anecdotal evidence, so it doesn't prove a thing (and I drink my beer fast), but as Charlie explains in the podcast cleaning is very, very important for the homebrewer as to not leave organic material that can harbour bacteria, mold and wild yeast in important quantities. He even goes to say that sanitizing is more of an insurance policy on your cleaning. That's debatable, but it's true that if you pitch healthy yeast at an appropriate rate, the small amount of bugs that might or might not be present on your clean equipment have a far lesser chance of taking hold.

Moral of the story: bleach, does it work ? Yes. Can it be used without making your beer taste like band-aids ? Yes. Is it the best performing thing on the market right now ? Not a chance. If I were to brew keeping beers (6 months plus), I'd use the modern stuff too (StarSan, Iodophor). The reason I started with bleach is that none of the lhbs that I knew of when I started with the hobby carried StarSan or Iodohpor. All they did carry was that horrible pink powder that you have to rinse with hot water. I stumbled about the podcast, gave it a go and it worked.

 

[kingwood-kid]

I use bleach, because it's dirt-cheap, very effective, and like being the guy in line with 2 cases of bleach and no intention of using a drop of it on my laundry. I make good beer often enough to know that using bleach as a sanitizer certainly doesn't ruin beer, although I'm not discounting the possibility that using Starsan instead would improve my results. I'm just wondering about the people who wear clothes they're worried about ruining while brewing beer.

 

[Curtis2010]

I also primarily use bleach, but do use PBW on my kegging gear sometimes. Where PBW really excels is removing krud left over from fermenting in kegs. Bleach of course does not do this, but I have never had a batch of beer with off-flavors due to bleach or bacterial infection -- I've have of course managed to screw a few up in other ways.

 

[rustym]

I used to use bleach all the time. Never had a problem with it affecting the taste of my beer. I was always a clean freak and rinsed and used it how it was supposed to be used. It is cheap and plentiful. Thank God for Star San!!! Soooooo much easier and it lasts forever. Why do all the extra work? I'll only use bleach if I'm in a pinch. Other than that, it's Star San for me!

 

[madhatt3r]

Bleach for glass. B-Brite for Kegs. I've had one infection in 6 years of brewing. Pretty sure it was because I didn't clean the poppets on the keg well enough with the B-Brite.

I rinse the glass carboys until the bleach smell is just above undetectable, let dry inverted for 10 mins, and let the wort flow...

 

[ipso]

Star San is still so ...Johnny come lately. F’r criminy sakes - it’s like driving a Prius.

[Real men use Iodophor] should be a bumper sticker included with the 32oz bottle!

I jest. When I FINALLY ran out of my 32oz bottle of Iodophor, I went to the shop to get some Star San but they were out. So pissed. Nor did they have the little bottle of Iodophor. I was brewing the same day so was forced to get another 32oz bottle - so sometime in 2020 I may try Star San.

However, “Iodophor is a stone killer. Red is dead.” – Charlie Talley. (via a different podcast – as I remember it, from so many years ago. He gets into PH and also talks about using vinegar if your water is whacky - and recommends using distilled with Star San for spray bottle application. All that is from beer soaked memory though.

I ditched PBW ($$$) for unscented OxiClean, per vast recommendation on this board. Funny story, I went online and had a hell of a time finding where to buy the unscented version locally. Ended up driving to a gnarly section of South Central Los Angeles and … it was just … beyond description. Took me half a day and one of the worst lines (read: checkers) in the history of all stores, of all time, in all worlds, in all dimensions of possibility. Anyway, the following week I gasp as I see it on my local supermarket shelf. Gee - never thought to look there.

I use BLC.

For a very long time I used 1oz of bleach to 5gal, to sanitize, but would rinse thoroughly with cold tap water – completely oblivious (for over a decade, and a few mysterious infections later) that I was defeating the purpose of sanitizing to a large extent. Then for the second decade I used easily double the recommended Iodophor – completely oblivious to the fact that that does not kill them twice as dead, nor does letting everything soak for 20min kill them 10 times more dead still.

The above BrewingNetwork podcast finally sorted me out. That was a good day.

 

[RScottyL]

i use iodophor, and it works great.

The only unfortunate thing about it, is that it stains!

I would prefer to use something clear!

 

[msa8967]

All of my equipment eventually gets a beach soak at some point in its downtime .
I don't use it as a sanitizer on equipment thats curently being used to brew a batch

How long do you soak your equipment for and what strength of bleach solution do you recommend using?

 

[grimstuff]

Nothing disinfects more as cheaply as chlorine does. The claim that it doesn't do anything flies in the face of its use in thousands of applications worldwide for over 150 years. Whether or not its ideal for brewing systems is another matter. And as for rinsing it afterwards and introducing more pathogens... I think that's pretty stupid reasoning since the tap water you use to rinse has also been treated with chlorine.

With that said, StarSan seems to be the standard, and when used with a spray bottle, a little goes a very, very long way. At my current brewing pace, my bottle of StarSan will last me about 10 years.

 

[amandabab]

How long do you soak your equipment for and what strength of bleach solution do you recommend using?

I use it for equipment that's been in storage and is going to be washed, or bottles that are new to me.

smells like strong beach water is close enough and an afternoon or when I get to it is long enough

 

[msa8967]

Thanks...I am getting ready to store some of the equipment (buckets) for several months and wanted to make sure I put it away clean and free of any microscopic nasties.