Daily Sanitizing Question

[artificialrobot]

I have a potentially silly question about sanitizing. I am working on my second batch of beer (a roggenbier kit from AHB). Anyway, it's been in the primary for almost a week and I have seen a lot of recommendations to start taking hydrometer readings to see when it levels out before moving on to secondary.

I have a thief and all, but I'm curious if anyone has any tips for quick sanitization. It's not a huge deal, but mixing up a batch of sanitizer every day just to sanitize a thief and hydrometer can get to be a pain. Is there any way to mix up some sanitizer and keep it around for a few days to reuse or will it lose effectiveness? I am sure this varies by type of sanitizer, but like I said any tips/best practices would be appreciated to streamline this process a bit.

 

[GilaMinumBeer]

StarSan in a spritzer.

 

[Revvy]

Many of use keep a spray bottle full of our favorite starson or iodophor dilluted in distilled water handy for such a thing.

But you don't even need to do that, you can mix even the smallest volume of sanitizer and use it...you just need to calculate how much you need in the volume of water. For example for a quart of dilluted starsan iirc, I need 2 ml of starsan for the quart of water.

I have one of those eyedroppers for dispensing kids cough medicine I got from the drug store, it has various measurements on it, and I jusrt draw up as much as I need for the job at hand...

but usually my spray bottle is sufficient.

 

[artificialrobot]

Wow, you guys are quick on the draw around here! Thanks for the replies, I knew there had to be an easier way. I will have to pick up some starsan next time I hit up AHB.

 

[arxix]

Yeah, a cheep spray bottle from Ace hardware filled with sanitizer is a great thing to have around.

On another note, if you are just using your thief or auto-syphon, cold you just fill up a pitcher (or other tall thin water holding thing) with sanitizer and just leave it in there when not in use. Sort of like a barber who keeps there combs in barbaside?

 

[artificialrobot]

@arxix I thought about this. I picked up a wallpaper prep tray on recommendation from a friend which works great for sanitizing tall items without using a ton of water and sanitizer, but I wasn't sure if a) leaving items in sanitizing solution long term is a good idea and b) if the sanitizer would start to lose effectiveness over time.

Either way, I think the spray bottle technique will prove to be the easiest and I won't have to leave a tray of sanitizing solution laying around just tempting my cats to come drink out of it.

 

[malkore]

I often use the same batch of star-san from brewday on bottling day, so I just dunk the hydro in for 30 seconds, then put it in my bucket for a reading. that's the advantage of bucket primaries...no need to break out the thief.
I never rack until its totally done fermenting.

My thief mostly gets used on wine and mead.

 

[wildwest450]

I often use the same batch of star-san from brewday on bottling day, so I just dunk the hydro in for 30 seconds, then put it in my bucket for a reading. that's the advantage of bucket primaries...no need to break out the thief.
I never rack until its totally done fermenting.

My thief mostly gets used on wine and mead.

You must have a little tiny head to stick in the bucket.

 

[sillyburt]

@arxix I thought about this. I picked up a wallpaper prep tray on recommendation from a friend which works great for sanitizing tall items without using a ton of water and sanitizer, but I wasn't sure if a) leaving items in sanitizing solution long term is a good idea and b) if the sanitizer would start to lose effectiveness over time.

Either way, I think the spray bottle technique will prove to be the easiest and I won't have to leave a tray of sanitizing solution laying around just tempting my cats to come drink out of it.

I've seen some people use a PVC piece of tubing (3" IIRC) with a toilet 'knock out' flange on the bottom as a seal and stabilized bottom. I recently went and bought some of this equipment at 'the big orange box' but I'm hesitant to find out what the PVC glue will do as far as having that type of chemical soak into/on something that I'll be using for beer that I'll be drinking.

the tube is used for sanitizing longer items (siphon, thief etc.)

I've tried to search for this type of thing on this site but I can't seem to be able to search for two words together...I always get search results with one word OR the other.

 

[Hang Glider]

And if you're into kegging - an extra corny is AWESOME for holding 5 gallons of StarSan (seals up, too!) Then you have something to dunk the tubing and siphons into on bottling/kegging day, and a storage container, and a source to refill your spray bottle....and it stays VERY shiny inside!
I've been doing that for years, no problems.