Can I reuse a pickle/cheese bucket?

[biggerthanyou83]

I own a restaurant and I want to use some of the left over pickle or Feta cheese bucket for my home brewing. They are rated for food. I rinsed out a feta bucket and filled it to the top with hot water and bleach and let it sit or 5 hours…. It smell like a new bucket. Should I worry about any thing else? Im thinking about filling it up know with iodine and using it as a sanitizing bucket first before I think about putting beer in it.

 

[unionrdr]

That's close to what I do. I soak'em in foamy dish soap,& scrub,then rinse a couple times to make sure all the oily/greasy parts of the food are dissolved & gone. Then,soak'em in PBW solution for 24 hours or so,then rinse again. They come out smelling cleaner than new. In other words,no plastic smell,or others. Just smells clean & neutral.

 

[broadbill]

Word on the street is that you'll never get the pickle smell out of the pickle bucket. Sounds like you did ok with the feta bucket.

 

[biggerthanyou83]

Yeah i rinse and now ill just use it fopr sanitizing... Smells good.

 

[unionrdr]

I haven't tried it with a pickle bucket yet,but I'd soak it in the PBW for a couple days with the lid on it & see if that does it. It isn't soaking into the plastic,I believe it's just forming a tough film on the surface that's stubborn to remove. The last bucket I cleaned was the orange home cheapo one I used for fishing! No trace of that smell left! Is there anything Five Star PBW can't clean?

 

[Wyrmwood]

I washed the dickens out of a pickle bucket a while back. I kept washing, rinsing, then put it over my head and repeated until I didn't smell pickles. Later, I decided to drill out a hole for a spigot and it cracked on me. It was a lot work for a $12 bucket. Next time a restaurant offers me a pickle bucket, I think I'll just buy another bucket from the lhbs.

 

[smyrnaquince]

I have managed to remove all the pickle smell from a pickle bucket with a very strong bleach solution, a long soak, and a lot of time in fresh air.

The problem I have is that the bucket holds 5 gallons and (as far as I know) I need at least a 6-gallon bucket to make a 5-gallon batch of beer and contain the kreusen.

 

[vanceromance]

you can use the 5 gallon bucket for a secondary, making apfelwien or skeeter pee as there is little or no kreusen.