Betadine discontinued: UK replacement for sanitizing brewing

I wonder how much iodine is left behind?

A typical recommended intake is 150 micrograms a day. Significantly greater intake is controversial.

Yeah, that's what I do. In fact I only got into beer brewing when a mate of mine told me that you could wash what we call stubbys, 375ml small glass bottles, in the dishwasher. Wasn't keen on the manual work of washing them by hand.

Works fine.

I have just recently got a hell of a lot of what we call longnecks, 750ml traditional glass beer bottles which our locals use for tomato sauce and which were really filthy because whoever had used them had not bothered to rinse them out after using the tomato sauce from them.

Those did need quite a few runs thru the dishwasher, after a soak with diluted non scented bleach for a day or so before the dishwasher, but did come good fine.

The only real problem with the dishwasher is that it can't do PETs.

Yep, and the stubbys come out much cleaner than you ever get doing them by hand using anything. Really squeaky clean, literally.

You don’t need to fit them all in in one go.

I just rinse with a little water the next morning, to get the sediment out, then do the dishwasher run ever 9 days when the beer glasses are all dirty.

I don’t care how long it takes because they go in the dishwasher with everything else and the machine does that by itself with me doing something else entirely.

Yep, that's how I do mine.

By deliberately not rinsing the sediment out of some and finding it works fine.

The only reason I rinse the sediment out the day after drinking the contents is because I wash mine as part of the normal dishwasher load and only do a dishwasher run every 9 days and the sediment can dry out in that time.

I find it works fine for the full sized 750ml traditional glass bottles too, although a mate of mine did say that his dishwasher doesn’t do the 375ml glass ones very well.

I always put mine in the bottom rack and have noticed that there is some variation in the holes in the spray arm between dishwashers, but 3 of my dishwashers all work fine.

Even you lot don’t normally do flat beer either.

The instructions I have (C&P'd from the uk-homebrew mailing list in

You want a 500ml bottle of Standardised Betadine Antiseptic Solution Aqueous (not the alcoholic one) made by Seton Healthcare Group PLC.

Iodophor and Betadine are the same thing. It is available in UK chemists, although they may have to look it up in their big book and therefore may take a few days to come in. You need to ask for Standardised Betadine Antiseptic Solution (Aqueous)

Use it at 12.5 - 25 ppm total iodine, or 1.25 to 2.5 ml/l of the standard solution of 10% Povidone-iodine containing 1% iodine.

It works out at 6.5ml per gallon (ish), slosh it around for a couple of minutes then let it drip dry. Apparently at 12.5 ppm its a 30 second contact time, and no rinse.

If I mix the stuff at the strong end of that range, 25 ppm iodine (I'm assuming that's w/v), I figure 150 microgrammes corresponds to 6 litres of solution. I reckon that a brief period of dripping is going to leave at most 10 ml of solution in a bottle. Of course, there's also the amount left in the fermenter & on other bits of equipment, but there's no way that amounts to 6 litres of sanitizing solution in

Thank you. That is a reassurance!

Made me realise that one source might be an agricultural merchant.

Apparently the change from very widespread use of iodine-based teat disinfectant has reduced iodine consumption sufficiently to raise fears about iodine deficiency. The amount getting into milk products might have been sufficient to tip over from deficient to replete in many of us.

...

Well, did you check my calculations? (I wouldn't mind.)

Good point. I think the no-rinse iodine thing started with Iodophor, which is sold for milking machines & teats, among US homebrewers; then UK brewers realized Betadine was the same thing.

I don't think you can. I notice that narrow-necked things like bottles sometimes come out of the dishwasher with some gunge inside them even though everything else is clean.

For sanitizing large batches of bottles, it's worth checking out the homemade no-rinse solution that Charlie Talley of Five Star describes on the March 29 2007 podcast here:

I've done it, it's extremely easy to mix up 5 or 10 gallons which works great for soaking big batches of bottles; you just need to follow the simple safety recommendations. I wouldn't do it unless the bottles were already well cleaned inside and out, of course.

Five Star makes Star San, and I don't think Talley would talk about this unless he thought it worked. I generally use Star San, but I think this is a valid alternative.

All that junk was invented to separate dumb yups form their Black Visor Cards. How do you speel Clorox?

Is it the Avvinatore model?

If you are leaving bottles to drip drain & dry, then Milton or Sodium Metabisulphite would work just the same.

Hell in m y wine I add metabisulphite to stabilise ... the minuscule amount left after drying won't harm your beer.