Industrial Bottle Sanitation

[jvend]

I've heard big breweries before they fill bottles with beer, they rinse bottles with water, but that doesn't kill bacteria necessarily. Thats the only step they take to clean bottles? What other technique breweries use to make sure product doesn't get infected?

 

[Beerrific]

Rinse and then sanitize with hydrogen peroxide.

 

[jvend]

But the rinsing is just before the beer filling, how is that?

 

[thatjonguy]

Most don't. Same thing with caps, cans, lids. In theory they could rinse them with a no-rinse sanitizer like Starsan. Thus, killing two birds with one stone.

But they are using new bottles never before drank (and backwashed into). Think of how many things you do in your house that don't happen in the bottling area of a brewery (and the environmental controls). Also, where you store your bottles and brew. Bigger breweries (not necessarily craft) often pasteurize their bottled or canned offerings.

 

[jvend]

So how is it? The machine rinses with that cleanser And then with water?

 

[Revvy]

It really doesn't matter what the big guys do or don't do before the bottles of beer pass through the pasteurization part of the line. Everything is getting sterilized at one.

If you have a tunnel pasteurizer/cooler at the end of the line, all the work is done.

Bottles Tunnel Pasteurizer-Coolers

A wide range of automatic plants to pasteurise/sterilize and cool can, jar, bottle, plastic containers, flexible pouch-bag after filling destined to individual use, from 100 ml. to 5.000 ml. capacity designed and dimensioned according to the specific inquiry and scope.

These kind of equipment are consisting in the production of:

- Tunnel Pasteurizer-Cooler-Dryer, usually employed for thermal treatment up to 100 °C in which the containers (can, jar, pouch-bag, cups, bottle) , entering into a tunnel by proper motorized belt conveyor, are pervaded from a shower of hot water during the pasteurization phase and from a shower of cold water during the progressive cooling up to the final container dropping at outlet; the machine provides automatically the sterilizing and cooling cycle by controlling all treatment parameters;

Bottling lines consists of loaders and unloaders, bottle washing machines, pasteurizers (tunnel pasteurizers, flash pasteurizers, cabinet pasteurizers), conveyors of bottles, crates and crate washers.

The last step before packaging in cases and six packs is a pasterurizer.



And if the beer's bottle conditioned, they have another method of sanitization....

 

[BetterSense]

There's no simple answer. They probably do a lot of different things depending on what they need and what is cheapest. Recycled bottles come in with labels and junk in them, and have to have the labels stripped off. I believe they use hot lye and peroxide. Even if they use new bottles, they have to sanitize them, but I think they just use heat (steam).