Decanter Cleaning?

A quick rinse with bleach diluted with warm water should remove it in seconds. Rinse thoroughly afterwards. You don't want _any_ bleach residue in your decanter to ruin the next wine you put in it.

Tom S

I have seen brass ball bearings smaller than BBs which were sold at an abominable price for swishing around the inside of a decanter to clean it. I would think small ball bearings would do the same job, and cheaper.

I would suggest that you use a tablet for denture cleaning. You can buy a box at a US drugstore for about $2, and they work for me every time.

I've always used 1/4 cup of rice, and then added a water/ vinegar mixture. The rice acts like little scrubbers.

My general understanding is that crystal should never be allowed to have wine rest for a long period of time. Crystal is not a smooth surface, and your bound to get stains. This has happened to my Riedel Sommelier series glasses (well at least one or two) after I left some heavy reds overnight.

The torture of using a cleansing product is that it is likely to embed in the crystal the same way the wine has embedded. The best suggestion I read might be the rice and vinegar. Personally, I would pick a $2 wine and rinse the decanter several times to get out any notion of a cleansing product.

My number one decanter issue is drying . Still haven't done my better than hanging upside down and letting nature dry it out.

We use denture tablets that contain bicarbonate. Dont use that tablets that contain whitening agents as they contain bleach. Fill the decanter with warm but not hot water then leave a denture tablet overnight soaking, and by the morning you will be left with a nice clean decanter. Rinse thoroughly with warm water to remove any residue and leave to dry upside down.

grazza

I'd first thought of using bleach (a tsp.) and letting it set for 30-60 minutes, then rinsing it "forever." I'm just not convinced that I'd be able to remove the bleach with enough certainty. [ Over-paranoia, I know.]

The Ranger

Hagley suggested in message news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

I'd've never thought to use this product; thanks!

The Ranger

Thanks! My uncle, the barman, clicked his tongue when I asked for his advice and suggested those items.

The Ranger

"The Ranger" wrote in news:bro4t1$5bfqp$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-61173.news.uni-berlin.de:

baking soda in solution will act as a mild bleach as well, and leaves no nasty residue.

I don't think it's crystal, at least not the fancy leaded crystal that I've seen advertised.

I think I'll try the rice/vinegar first and if that doesn't work, I'll move on to the denture cleaner.

Many thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts and experiences.

The Ranger

Several of the methods suggested will work for at least some stains. More severe stains that produce etching probably can be completely removed only by polishing the glass on the inside using shot and very fine grinding and polishing compounds and a machne that rotates the decanter for a long time. Unless you polish rocks as a hobby, this is something for a professional, and would be worthwhile only for a very expensive item.

In the US, there is a commercial product called CLR that often will remove many calcum-lime-rust types of stains(hence the name). It can clean up coffee pots that can become very stained. It is widely available in some home improvement stores and supermarkets. Be sure to read the instructions carefully. It contains glycolic,sulfamic, and citric acids as well as surfactants. If it works, it works fairly fast and long contact is not suggested for most surfaces. I have used it on coffee pots and a rust stain on a bath tub, but not on a decanter yet. This might be a good last resort if milder cleaning methods fail and you can not justify the expense of professional polishing.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

Not really paranoia at all. The chlorine smell is *very* hard to totally remove. However, if you've got access to winemaking supplies, you can rinse with a solution of sodium metabisulfite, which will quench the bleach and eliminate all traces of it. Having said that, I'd still be wary of using bleach and opt instead for peroxide solution, again rinsing first with metabisfulite and then with distilled water.

Mark Lipton Paranoiac chemophobe -- not!

IIRC, you've quite knowledgable about chemistry, so forgive me if I state the obvious: the CLR is designed to remove inorganic salts through chelation and probably won't do much on the presumably organic residue left in a decanter. The surfactants might possibly help loosen the deposits, but then so too would alcohol or soap.

Mark Lipton

Mark Lipton confirmed my worries in message news: snipped-for-privacy@purdue.edu...

I do have access to those items but have discovered that white vinegar and rice, while not only handy, worked in a record 15 seconds.

The Ranger

The CLR of course would not remove organics directly. However if there is an inorganic coating of calcium compounds and such, this coat does tend to pick up stains - especially in a coffee pot. If you can remove the inorganic coat, likely much of the organic stain goes with it. At least that is what seems to happen with a coffee pot where most of the dark stain on the inorganic deposit likely is organic. If you wash a decanter, especially with soap rather than detergents, hard water may produce some film. If the decanter is well rinsed in hard water, but a bit of water remains in it when it dries, this may also build up some inorgaic film. In a hard water area I would suggest using detergents, nonionic when possible, to wash a decanter and then using distilled water as a final rinse. Distilled water is qute cheap at the grocery, but be sure to smell it. I have found some that had a bit of smell.

Of course the old classic chemistry lab hot cleaning soution made from concentrated sulfuric acid, with a chrominum containing compound, would be much better. However, even if the compounds to make this solution could be bought for home use, this wold be very dangerous for anyone without proper safety training and protective equipment. And since decanters usually are not made of heat-proof glass, the decanter might have to be slowly warmed to about the temperature of the hot cleaning solution, before using it, to avoid possible breakage.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

I get your point now. However, I suspect that (unlike the case of the coffee pot) deposits on the inside of the decanter are dried wine that would be almost free of scale or lime. However, as you say, there may be other sources of the deposits that would certainly be amenable to your treatment.

As a resident of an area with incredibly hard tapwater (a glass of tap water has a pH of ~9 and if left standing 12 hours will throw a thick deposit of rust), I face this issue constantly. I wash my glassware with hot tap water followed *immediately* by distilled water, then dry with a linen towel. That almost eliminates the deposits, but I am still ocassionally tempted to take a particularly recalcitrant Riedel fishbowl into lab for a "cleaning solution" treatment... ;-)

As you probably know, chromium VI salts are potent carcinogens, so even I would not attempt to use chromic acid to clean any drinking vessel. In fact (you may know this already) even academic labs -- usually the last to succumb to any regulatory laws -- have been forbidden to use chromic acid cleaning solutions for over a decade now. OTOH, aqua regia would do quite a fine job of removing most any deposit from even the most delicate glass (however, using it on lead crystal would be a Very Bad Idea) and should not present any human health hazard if properly removed afterward by rinsing. Still, I don't see myself doing this to my decanters any time soon...

Mark Lipton

I knew that use of chromium salts had been restricted, but I am surprised that it has even extended to the lab for cleaning solution. The concern probably is that the chromium salts will be flushed down the drain and polute a river from which drinking water is drawn downstream. In the lab, chromium salts are one of the less bothersome compounds that one works with. At one time I worked with several metallo-organic compounds including those including chromium, mercury, vanadium, nickel, etc. Some of the mercury compounds are especially toxic. Some can easily be absorbed through the skin, and it takes very little to send you to the morgue.

I have been retired a few years, so I did not hear about the ban on cleaning solution in labs. I did read that a local petroleum company had to quit discarding photographic solutions down the drain without treatment, because of the silver content. I actually did very little lab wet chemistry except early on. I was one of those people who was accused of trying to get a physics degree in the chemistry department, since most of my work involved complex instruments, computers, math, and such.

I do find it amusing that even the smallest traces of some things the public thinks of as "chemicals" are banned. Yet people continue to use smoked and fire-seared meat when it is well know that smoke and charred meat contain a variety of carcinogens. It seems that if something is "natural" there often is little concern. Yet botulism toxin is natural and only a small bottle of it would be enough to kill thousands, if not millions, of people. Or getting back to wine, too much alcohol can produce undesirable long term health effects, but most do not cry out to ban wine because a few abuse it and harm their health. Of course I am well aware that where I live there is a small minority that would ban all alcohol and send sellers and users to jail, if they had their way

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net from my email address. Then add snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . I do not check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.

Correct. How universal the ban is I cannot say, nor at what level the proscription arises, but I know of no researcher who stills uses chromate cleaning solutions.

Indeed! Small organomercurials are incredibly dangerous things (witness Minamata for an exceptionally tragic RL demo). Within the last two years, a Chemistry Professor (NMR) died from mercury poisoning produced by a dimethylmercury NMR standard. She was wearing two layers of latex glove, but a drop spilled on her glove traveled through both layers and skin fast enough to kill her from acute heavy metal toxicity. FWIW, trimethylstannanes are every bit as bad for us organikers and are volatile to boot!

Silver as a pollutant? Most people would gladly deal with that little problem, I think. Perhaps they were using cyanide in their processing?

I was one who spent half my time at the computer and half in the lab. Still do today, matter of fact. Unless you took early retirement, you must have been among the first generation of scientist to use computers (or I can't do simple arithmetic).

Even worse, the word "chemical" itself is now a perjorative, despite the reality that we are nothing but a huge collection of chemicals assembled in a particular way!

Ah, but Bruce Ames (inventor of the Ames test for "carcinogenicity") has shown that even a banana will contain over a hundred different carcinogens. This in turn has raised the question of whether we as organisms have evolved to detoxify certain mutagens in our diet. Animal studies have lent support to that idea, though even a rat is only a so-so model for human digestion and metabolism. So, despite the potent mutagenicity of benzo[a]pyrene in soot, there is little to no evidence of its ability to cause cancer in humans. One argument is that 10-20,000 years of cooking food over open fires has weeded out the susceptible individuals from the population. Now, if only we could get rats to BBQ we'd have a strong answer! ;-)

And alas in this country "natural" now carries with it an aura of healthfulness, hence the advent of "nutraceuticals" as an essentially unregulated bastion of quackery and charlatans. Chemophobes of the world beware!

Mark Lipton