Old bottles growing stuff in them, can I still use them?

[hobohrau]

The family has been collecting wine and beer bottles to be used for homebrew, but I guess not everyone has been rinsing them out thoroughly, so some of the bottles are growing spore colonies of ... who knows what.

I have Easy Clean and Iodophor -- if I fill the bottles with the Easy Clean and then go at it with a bottling brush will it have enough oomf to get rid of that crap growing in it? (Side note: should I just fill the bottling bucket with Easy Clean and then use the wand to fill the bottles?)

Should I do a second step of sanitizing it with the iodophor just to be on the safe side or is that overkill?

Was hoping to bottle today, but it might turn out that I don't have enough bottles

 

[Germelli1]

Well when I get bottles from an uninformed source (bars, events, friends, family, etc) I usually soak them overnight in a strong bleach solution, hit them with a brush, then soak them overnight again in oxyclean, then rinse them out REALLY well.

The bleach is to kill anything in there, and the oxyclean is to remove anything left behind as well as the labels. Both of these require a thorough rinse out afterwards, but usually only rinse them out after the oxyclean soak. Then I close them up in boxes after they dry and store them.

When it comes time to bottle, I hit them with starsan/idophor/etc or run them through the dishwasher without soap

 

[Germelli1]

Oh I would like to add that easy clean is very similar to oxyclean is terms of cleansing!

 

[Noodle]

I had some bottles just recently that were had the same issue. I let the soak in oxyclean over night. Then hit them with the bottle brush and sanitzed them. They sat for about a month and then on Friday I re-sanized them and used them to bottle my oktoberfest so hopefully it was enough to get them clean.

 

[grathan]

I used a soak in Pbw on some bottles that had sat for months. No brush was needed.