Newbie - Sterilization

First, go check out

- it will address everything in plenty of detail.

Bottom line, clean everything completely with regular soap and water and rinse. You'll then need to "sanitize" anything that will contact the beer after your boil. You can mix up a sanitizing solution from bleach or you can buy other substances made just for that purpose. You then soak your bottles, fermenting bucket, etc., in the sanitizing solution for as long as is appropriate (5, 10, 20 minutes, etc). Some solutions are no-rinse and others need to be rinsed (bleach-water usually needs to be rinsed). Rinsing with normal tapwater is usually OK assuming that your tapwater is normal, treated city type water.

(BTW, I use (plain, unscented) bleach and I mix a "couple glugs" into about 4 gallons of water in my fermenting bucket and let things sit about 10+ minutes).

Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew! (RDWHAHB) Have fun!

Thanks, I will check out the link. When I googled brewing all I could find were sites that wanted to sell me stuff.

Sanitized, not sterilized. There are many cleaners like One-Step, Idophor, and the like. Many of us use diluted bleach (a cup or so to 5 gallons of water). I usually soak glass overnight, and plastic for a few hours. Rinse with hot water until there is no more bleach smell. Only use regular chlorine bleach, not any kind of scented bleach. Bottles can be washed in the sink with a bottle brush. My routine now is to clean the bottles after they are emptied with hot water and let dry (upside down). If you let bottles sit without cleaning, that can get moldy inside. If I find a moldy bottle, I will sometimes soak it overnight in oxy-clean, but I usually just chuck it (why take a chance?). When I'm ready to bottle, I turn up the water heater, and run the bottles through the dishwasher ( NO SOAP OF ANY KIND) twice with the heated drying turned on. The heat from the drying will sanitize the bottles. I can usually get 50 or so bottles in the dishwasher. I have used a bottle washer attached to my laundry sink in the past, but it became very tedious. I now just use the bottle washer to clean carboys.

If you don't have a dish washer, you need to soak the bottles in some kind of sanitizing solution. Some require rinsing and some do not. There has been a lot of debate about which is the best sanitizer. Bleach works fine for me IMHO and have had no infections in almost 10 years of brewing.

Hope this helps.

Les

You need two steps

firstly, bottles etc need to be clean so wash them with a bottle brush to get rid of any gunk and stains that are in there.

Secondly you need to sanitise. The easiest way is to soak them for

30-60 minutes in a solution of 1 cupful of bleach to 25 litres of water. I fill up my fermenter and put all my bottles, bottle caps etc in there to soak.

If anything is badly stained then a 24 hour soak will breakdown any organic matter etc.

I

[snip]

If you want to check the brewing archives, hit the Groups tab on the Google home page. From there, go to the group you want to search and type in your key words. You'll find lots of posts that way.

BTW, you may also want to check out rec.crafts.brewing (the most active brewing newsgroup I know of) and alt.homebrewing [I just searched the r.c.b archives for "Bottle Sterilizing" and got about 550 hits.]

Oh get out!!! it's not that friggin complicated... you've got three basic choices:

1. Iodophor ("no rinse" and 'easiest')
2. Chlorine based cleaners (including good ol' bleach)-- a bit more work and requires rinsing
3. boiling/kilning/autoclaving -- OVERKILL

If you can get BTF iodophor this'll do you fine with least hassle... just let 'em drip dry before you plop the brew in... if you get household bleach or B-Brite/C-Brite you've got to wash the rascals after "cleaning". If you go further than that you've got more time on your hands than the average homebrewer... read a book and use BTF Iodophor... then you can "relax, don't worry and have a homebrew". Whatever that means-- if you were that type of personality you wouldn't be homebrewing; you'd be buying brews from the store and developing serious front ass watching the telly.

YGW

So you don't reckon sodium metabisulphate, sodium percarbonate or phosphoric acid based sanitizers are any good? I have only used the first two and so far haven't had any infected beer.

You've been lucky. None of those are effective sanitizers for beer.

--------->Denny

That's quite possible, I have only brewed three batches. Then again I just use water out of the garden hose to bring my wort up to the desired volume for fermentation. The scary thing is that these (in particular the sodium m.) is pretty much what the LHBS promote as sanitisers.

Being a newbie at homebrewing means I need to sift through the shit loads of (often contradictory) information on the web and elsewhere and make up my own mind. The info I have seen has been pretty favorable towards things like StarSan (phosphoric acid based) and "oxygen powered" (which I assume is largely sodium percarbonate).

I guess it is like PC backup software, you don't know how effective it is until you lose a hard disk.

cheers

I would say that you're not lucky but a miracle worker... first of all there's typically enough chlroine in unboiled city water to fry yeast fermentation and secondarily chlorine doesn't kill all the nasties that can put off the flavor of beer.

Are you measuring your final gravity to see what kind of attenuation you're getting?

I hear you about contradictory information but that's the philosophical side of beer-- you've got to do what works for you!!!! Live and learn. This is also the important aspect of keeping good records of what you've done that works or doesn't work..

Anyway... I guess I'm sold > >

At the end of the day even Homer Simpson could probably brew beer successfully.

Maybe chlorine levels vary from place to place. Melbourne has a reputation for very clean water. I have a water filter in my kitchen and there is not a great difference between what comes out it and what comes out unfiltered.

Yes. It has varied but about 1012 (say for an APA from a kit).

Exactly. Unfortunately newbies like me have to start somewhere and in my case it was a combination of research and what was on the shelf at the LHBS.

As soon as I can convert that old twin tub washing machine :-)

I use Chlorine and have had good results. But yes, the cost is alot of cleaning, and a bleach-smelling kitchen and face/hair until you take a shower.

Not a bad idea, but for the smaller investment, I've had good luck using bottled water for those last two gallons. Depending on where you shop, I get mine at $0.87/gallon. Worth it to me. As for the other 3 gallons, I use Brita. The drinking water also adds some minerals to the mineral-sketchy Brita-filtered tap water.

Steve