Easiest Way To Clean The Dirtiest Beer Bottles When Making Beer

I thought I would switch gears for this Blog post as I not only make wine but I also make beer. Mind you, my story from this weekend can easily apply to wine making so if you only make wine read on!

I’m in the process of making a tasty Mexican Cerveza and this is just in time for patio weather in my neck of the woods. Since it is a Mexican beer I wanted to get some Corona bottles – I also figured they would be much easier to clean as they don’t have any labels to deal with.

I’m not sure how bottles are recycled in your part of the world but here in Alberta we have privately owned bottle depots where you bring all of your empties and in return you get your deposit back. I figured this would be the best place to get Corona bottles as they get them every day and I certainly wasn’t disappointed – although I had to explain to them several times why I wanted them as my request was certainly out of the norm.

In any event, we haggled a bit and before too long I was the proud owner of 6 dozen used, sludgy and empty bottles of Corona!

The biggest surprise though came after I started pulling the bottles out of the case as some of them were pretty disgusting – some had big chunks of mold at the bottom while another had a dead mouse! Yuck!

In retrospect I should have taken pictures of some of these bottles for your viewing pleasure but unfortunately I didn’t think of it until just now. You can trust me though when I say that they were pretty gross …

Typically bottle cleaning is the bain of most wine or beer maker’s existence and they typically leave this part to the very last minute but I knew how dirty these bottles were going to be so wanted to plan ahead.

My wife Michelle and I plan on bottling the beer this coming Saturday and wanted to get things done well in advance so came up with a 5-part plan of attack:

Step 1 – Pre-rinse the bottles with a jet bottle washer so that we can clean out the sludge, mold … and dead mice.

Step 2 – Disinfect with “Sani Brew” for 5 days (note typically doing this over night is fine but figured we’d do it longer since we had the time). We have a large primary that a friend donated that so happens to be perfect for holding 6 dozen bottles of beer or 30 bottles of wine. If you don’t have one of these then consider going out and purchasing a big green plastic garbage can.

It’s worth noting that the Sani Brew has bleach in it so you are best to cover your sanitizing bucket with a blanket or towel so you can contain the bleach “aroma”.

Step 3 – Double rinse the bottles with fresh water to get the Sani Brew detergent out of the bottles (remember that Sani Brew has chlorine in it so isn’t exactly digestion friendly and therefore it is definitely worth over doing it on the rinsing part at this stage).

Step 4 – Sterilizing with a metabisulphite solution using a “sulfiter”.

Step 5 – More rinsing then we’re good to go!

(As a side note, I’ve read some posts where people use their oven to disinfect their bottles using heat, however bottles aren’t used to the heating and cooling so will fatigue and break. )

It is also worth pointing out that if you’re saving your used beer or wine bottles for future batches that you can save yourself a lot of grief by rinsing the bottles out with warm clean water shortly after you have used them then storing them upside down in a wine or beer bottle case so that dust (or mice) don’t collect inside them.

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

- Scott “The Wine Making Guy”