What method do you use to clean/sanitize your beer bottles?

[denogginizer]

For those of you that use the dishwasher method, do you put the swingtops with the rubber gaskets in there, too?

 

[dmomo]

+1 IMO rinsing right after pouring your beer out of the bottle is the single most important thing you can do to begin the cleaning process. This way you don't have to worry about getting that yeast cake out of the bottle.

+1 to this +1.

 

[Leggoma]

I'm cleaning a brand new set of bottles now. I washed them with a mild liquid dish detergent and let them dry. Now I'm cleaning a 2nd time with a mild bleach solution and letting them dry. Finally, I figured I would use a Star San dip along with the caps. Being new bottles, will this be sufficient to bottle my first batch?

 

[jiggs_casey]

24 hour soak in Oxyclean free to free up any labels or gunk on the inside. Then a hot water blast from a jet washer. Store them upside down so they drain completely out.

On bottling day, they all get a 20 minute hot water soak in one-step or c-brite.

That's it!

 

[Wynne-R]

Apparently there’s a lot of ways to do it. I’ve long suspected that my method is overkill. I see on this thread that some do more, some less, and it all seems to work. Nobody wrote in to say “Don’t try this.”

My method is to chuck the bottles into a generic oxi-clean solution immediately after pouring. That does most of the work.

So pretty much everybody is doing it the same. It’s a five step process. It’s just the details that are different.

Soak -I use cheap generic oxi-clean
Wash -I use boiling water and a bottle brush
Rinse -I spray vinegar and rinse with more boiling water.
Sanitize -I Spray Iodophor
Dry - I turn them up side down in the dishwasher.

I think draining them is very important, and often overlooked. Pathogens don’t grow without water. In my method, the Iodophor solution reduces the surface tension of the rinse water. The bottle will be nearly dry in a couple of hours.

On bottling day, I spray again with Iodophor and drain in the dishwasher. I can put 50+ bottles upside down in the dishwasher. Then I bottle over the dishwasher. When I’m done, I close the door. No clean-up. No mopping. No sticky floors.

 

[evwoller]

24 hour soak? I never see a point in going past an hour, even if there is some mold in the bottom it comes out rather easily