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

[Kylito87]

I usually do a hot wash first. Then I go to some easy clean. I then bust out my vinator with some star san and blast the bottles with that . I also take my spray bottle that has star san in it and spray the mouths of the bottles just to be safe. I like when you are done with the vinator you get a hat of foam to put on your head.

 

[brubrew]

This thread has been extremely helpful to my delabling and cleaning process. I'm on my 5th batch and have a little over 100 bottles I've delabled. Just tried oxyclean and it made delabling a sinch. Now all I have to do is get a vinator for sanitizing my bottle for my next batch.

 

[unionrdr]

Do it. do it now,you know you want to. That vinator & bottle tree are worth every penny! Made bottling day quicker & easier. Also a smaller footprint for 45 bottles at a time.

 

[Mase]

For those of you that do the Oxy or PBW & water soak over night, do you ever end up with a white residue on your bottle, case I think it os called?

 

[unionrdr]

No,but if I use it too many times,even filtering through a fine mesh strainer & coffee filters won't get out all the floury grainy stuff. Not to mention not all the dissolved label glue filters out. then it makes the fine grainy stuff stick to the bottles.
Time to pitch it at the porcelin altar & make more. I just did that a little bit ago to soak some newly emptied bottles from last night. Rinse out the dregs,then put them in the bucket of PBW for 2 hours. Then scrub with the bottle brush,rinse again,& hang on the bottle tree to dry.
With clean PBW solution,they dry crystal clear with no filmy stuff.

 

[Ultrazord]

I soak my bottles in oxyclean to remove labels and clean them on the inside. Then I run them in the sanitize on my dish washer. No problems yet and it's super easy.

 

[Mase]

That's good to know. I just remember reading somewhere that Oxy has a tendency to leave a caked on residue which i'm sure you could scrub off but that kind of defeats the purpose of sokaing them to being with!

I got a batch just sitting overnight in hot water. We'll see how that goes!

 

[unionrdr]

It seems to me someone said the oxifilm happens if the bottles are left in it too long. I think vinegar water removes it.

 

[Revvy]

For those of you that do the Oxy or PBW & water soak over night, do you ever end up with a white residue on your bottle, case I think it os called?

We call it scale, it's really common, it's just residue from the oxyclean as the water it's soaking in evaporates or reacting with minerals in the water. Usually a weak acid solution like vinegar and water, lemon juice and water, even a dillution of starsan and water usually breaks it down. Then lots of rinsing.

 

[Mase]

Thanks Revvy! That's what I was trying to recall. Perhaps I can cut down on the soaking time to prevent such evaporation.

 

[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