Cleaning Home Brew Bottles in the Dishwasher

Sanitizing your home brew bottles is tricky business … after all, the same bottle had once been filled with liquid, drank by someone else and most likely not immediately rinsed and cleaned. So why do home brewers continue to reuse bottle and endure the stares of friends when collecting up used bottles after a party? Because its a free method of storing and sharing home brew and some of us haven’t experimented yet with kegging.

TO CLEAN, SANITIZE OR STERILIZE?

The constant mantra of home brewers is that clean, sanitized bottles and equipment are important factors in avoiding infection and brewing a successful beer. Oddly enough, we use yeast in the most important part of the brewing process, which itself is a controlled infection of sorts. Cleaning a bottle involves a surface-level removal of debris and noticeable items in the bottle. Sanitizing a bottle starts to remove the microbes hiding below the surface, which is the goal here. Taking this one step further, to sterilize a bottle is to remove 100% of the microbes, a task rather difficult and probably not absolutely vital to home brewing.

TO BLEACH, CHEMICAL RINSE OR USE THE DISHWASHER?

We have tried a few methods of cleaning home brew bottles over the past few years. We started with “Easy Clean” no-rinse solution from LD Carlson and didn’t have any problems. When that ran out, we neglected to buy more and started using bleach to sanitize. This may have sanitized properly but we always worried the bottles were not rinsing completely clean of the bleach and may be affecting the taste of the home brew and lack of carbonation on a few batches. Through all this we have used the dishwasher (on regular wash cycle with no detergent) after cleaning the bottles and using bleach. The theory here was that all the bottles fit nicely into the dishwasher and this was much easier than another rinse (yes, we call that laziness). Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear possible for water to be sprayed accurately into each and every bottle, given the limited range of the dishwasher arm. Smelling a few bottles after the wash cycle still gave off a smell of bleach, which had use worried.

DISHWASHER ON SANITIZE CYCLE

What is home brewing about if not learning from your mistakes? We have since moved away from the bleach in favor of Star San chemical rinse and no longer use the dishwasher for our final rinse. Instead, I think we will utilize the “Sanitize Cycle” option, which blasts hot steam at 160 degrees for over an hour.  Other brewers on HomeBrewTalk agree that the sanitize feature can only help if proper sanitation has already been achieved in advance. I also found a rather in-depth scientific study of bottle sanitation and the amount of bacteria removed through different methods. His findings show that immediate rinsing and proper chemical sanitation are the best method to remove the majority of bacteria. He also recommends covering the bottle tops with tin foil after sanitizing and before bottling, which is a method I had not heard before. But he’s a scientist and I’m not, so it’s definitely worth a try.