Sterilizing

[BrisBrew]

Just wondering, can i use chlorine watered down instead of home brew sterilizing bottles?

I know a few guys that use chlorine because its much cheaper and rinse them off after. Couldnt notice it when i drank their beer.

Is chlorine alright?

 

[brewgasm]

Just wondering, can i use chlorine watered down instead of home brew sterilizing bottles?

I know a few guys that use chlorine because its much cheaper and rinse them off after. Couldnt notice it when i drank their beer.

Is chlorine alright?

I imagine you can but its pretty nasty stuff and takes alot to rinse out. Personally I wouldn't use it and it's not that versatile in the brewery. Since most of what we do as homebrewers is clean and sanitise I wouldn't want to cheap out when the mainstays are not terribly expensive to begin with. Sodium percabonate to wash /sanitise $6-$10 /kilo Phosphoric acid, about $9 worth will last years.

 

[BrisBrew]

I imagine you can but its pretty nasty stuff and takes alot to rinse out. Personally I wouldn't use it and it's not that versatile in the brewery. Since most of what we do as homebrewers is clean and sanitise I wouldn't want to cheap out when the mainstays are not terribly expensive to begin with. Sodium percabonate to wash /sanitise $6-$10 /kilo Phosphoric acid, about $9 worth will last years.

Sodium percabonate, did a small google on it...

found this
https://www.craftbrewer.com.au/oxyper-5kg-sodium-percarbonate

Is it a cleaner or sanitiser?

Does it come in a powder form and you mix it in water to use or liquid concentrate? looks promising but im a newb to this. How do i use it?

I currently use the link below
https://www.craftbrewer.com.au/sanitize-250ml

it says dilute 30ml to 1L of water. is it bad to do say 60ml to 1L of water or 90ml to 1L of water? is too much not good? i sometimes do 60 or 90ml per L so wondering if this is over kill or bad.


Thanks

 

[brewgasm]

Sodium percabonate, did a small google on it...

found this
https://www.craftbrewer.com.au/oxyper-5kg-sodium-percarbonate

Is it a cleaner or sanitiser?

It's Both Cleaner and sanitiser (after a 10 minute soak) but you have to rinse. it may not be necessary but it is best practice to sanitise with a no rinse sanitiser such as phosphoric acid, Iodophor, stellarSan /starsan, hydrogen peroxide (just double check that peroxide is no rinse, I'm not sure, I do have a bottle but its not my favourite so I don't use it) also that's a pretty good price!

 

[brewgasm]

I currently use the link below
https://www.craftbrewer.com.au/sanitize-250ml

it says dilute 30ml to 1L of water. is it bad to do say 60ml to 1L of water or 90ml to 1L of water? is too much not good? i sometimes do 60 or 90ml per L so wondering if this is over kill or bad.


Thanks

I Would Stick to the recommend dilution. Other sanitisers will give you more value for money.

Phosphoric acid 96% 1ml to 2000ml water
Iodophor 1ml to 1000ml water

Both much cheaper as you can get 500ml for less than 10 dollars. Say 500 ml of phosphoric acid cost you $8 and makes 500 litres of solution.

 

[brewgasm]

Sodium percabonate comes in powder form and is generally diluted in water 1-2 tsp/l

 

[RobinW]

Whats wrong with starsan?
I mix 1 fl ounce with 20L of RO or Distilled water in a cube and it keeps for ages.
Mix that with tap water and it goes cloudy and becomes useless pretty quick.
I keep some in a spray bottle to sterilise flasks etc when growing yeast. It's a steriliser not a cleaner.
Sodium Perc is a great cleaner but I find it needs hot water to perform and needs to act overnight to work at it's best.
I put some in my kegs with a jug of boiling water to clean the bottoms out.

 

[MHB]

1 fl oz is about 30 mL
Starsan contains Phosphoric acid and a surfactant/detergent, just Phosphoric on its own wont be quite the same.

Another good spot steriliser is 70% alcohol (water and ethanol, methylated spirits...) works really as a pickup and spray.
Mark

 

[Lucas2411]

I personally use chlorine bleach on many surfaces around the brewery (avoid leaving it on anything metallic, particularly stainless steel for longer than a few minutes) but those surfaces never come into direct contact with beer or yeast.

I use Di-San from Aldi as a sodium percarbonate cleaner. It's 3 bucks a kilo and is about ~33% sodium perc. Clean, rinse well and then sanitise with Starsan or Iodophor.

 

[Rocker1986]

Get on a sodium percarbonate bulk buy next time one happens. 25kg bag of sodium percarbonate (without the other ****) for $42 is way better value than buying nappy soakers or buying it from brew shops. It's a piece of piss to use it, there's no real optimum rate as far as I can tell like there is with acid sanitisers, just use what looks about right. There's no point using a shitload but also no point using **** all either. When I soak my fermenter I fill the whole thing up with hot tap water and dump in 4 scoops (the laundry powder things) of percarbonate, then rinse out the next day, spray with Starsan and fill with the next batch. I don't know what the grams per litre rate is for that but it works.

Those acid sanitisers should be diluted at the proper rate otherwise they become ineffective. So using more isn't good.

 

[brewgasm]

Whats wrong with starsan?
I mix 1 fl ounce with 20L of RO or Distilled water in a cube and it keeps for ages.
Mix that with tap water and it goes cloudy and becomes useless pretty quick.
I keep some in a spray bottle to sterilise flasks etc when growing yeast. It's a steriliser not a cleaner.
Sodium Perc is a great cleaner but I find it needs hot water to perform and needs to act overnight to work at it's best.
I put some in my kegs with a jug of boiling water to clean the bottoms out.

I could be wrong but doesn't sodium percabonate break down after 4 hours? I'm curious to know if that applies to sodium metasilicate and sodium metabisulfite as I use them also.

 

[RobinW]

No idea but I know it breaks down to water and oxygen so ends up being harmless.
I've been circulating it hot today through my boiler, pump and plate chiller.
Lots of brown water and hop residue are coming out of the gear.

 

[golfandbrew]

No need to over think this process.

Use sodium percarbonate, oxy per, oxy clean, PBW etc to clean your equipment. Don't bother with the diluted stuff from the supermarkets. You're not saving any money after they cut it with perfumes and whatever else. If you can get in on bulk buy like Rocker says above, even better.

To sanitize use a phosphoric based sanitizer like Star San, Stellar San, Quick San, Sani Clean etc. +1 to using with RO or Distilled water. It really does last much longer this way. If you want to change it up then use Iodaphor or something similar.

Point being use proven products that are made for the brewing industry or similarly the dairy industry.

Cheers

 

[BrisBrew]

thanks guys, so this link below what im after? And is star san rinse free?

Star San

 

[Rocker1986]

That's the stuff for sanitising. It is no-rinse so you just spray it on and leave it for a minute and you're good to go. Obviously the equipment needs to be clean first though.

You'll never get 100% sterilisation in a home brew scenario anyway, the best we can do is eliminate as many unwanted bugs as possible through good cleaning and sanitising practices.

 

[citizensnips]

The other reason to stay away from chlorine in your brew is due to chlorophenols. This is a common off flavour created from an interaction between yeast and chlorine. Believe me when you smell or taste this you won’t be wanting any chlorine near your beer again. To me it smells and tastes like a Clarke Rubber store. That potent synthetic rubber smell. Other people commonly get bandaid, medicine, acetone. It’s no good

 

[KegLand-com-au]

You can get Star San if you want but it's expensive because it's imported from America. We sell 500ml bottles of the same formulation on our website here:
https://www.kegland.com.au/phosphoric-acid-blend-sanitiser-500ml-starsan.html


If you want a real bargain we have a few sold even cheaper here:
https://www.kegland.com.au/stellars...sed-similar-to-starsan-secons-containers.html


I would agree with the other comments here. Do NOT use any chlorine based chemicals as the taste threshold is so incredibly low. So even if you get only get a few parts per billion it starts to become noticeable in your beverage. The issue is because you have to wash the chlorine out so thoroughly you end up significantly increasing the chance of introducing more microbes.


Some people use peroxide, sodium percarbonate or other types of "oxy/oxygen based" cleaners as a non-rinse sanitiser but we would not recommend this either. Mainly for these reasons:

1. You really need a surfactant if you are using a non-rinse sanitiser and sodium percarbonate on it's own will not have this.
2. Sodium percarbonate can affect the flavour of the final beer if the peroxide comes in contact with wort.

On the other hand the ingredients in Stellarsan are all edible, they can be metabolised by yeast and also they have very high taste threshold so even if you accidentally get some in the finished beer it's no big deal.

There are some products that claim to be "single step" sanitisers and cleaners but we have never seen anything anywhere which does a good job of both well so unfortunately this type of thing is too good to be true. You have sanitisers, and you have cleaners. If you really want to do a good job of both you need two products.

We should also say we have our own Powdered Brewing Wash formulation that is coming out next month too. This will be $9.95 per 1kg container so it will be great value and works as well as other Powdered Brewery washes that are double the price.

 

[KegLand-com-au]

Get on a sodium percarbonate bulk buy next time one happens. 25kg bag of sodium percarbonate (without the other ****) for $42 is way better value than buying nappy soakers or buying it from brew shops. It's a piece of piss to use it, there's no real optimum rate as far as I can tell like there is with acid sanitisers, just use what looks about right. There's no point using a shitload but also no point using **** all either. When I soak my fermenter I fill the whole thing up with hot tap water and dump in 4 scoops (the laundry powder things) of percarbonate, then rinse out the next day, spray with Starsan and fill with the next batch. I don't know what the grams per litre rate is for that but it works.

Those acid sanitisers should be diluted at the proper rate otherwise they become ineffective. So using more isn't good.

Sodium percarbonate is great at removing protein based soiling and also tannin (which is why it's so great at removing red wine from clothing like the nappy san adds on TV). With that said sodium percarbonate is no good at:
1. Removing oils (hop oils or any other oils), so ideally you want surfactnats to help with this
2. Its not particularly good if you have hard water. so you really need softening agents to help your cleaner do it's job
3. It's not good at removing beer stone on it's own

So yes sodium percarbonate will do a lot of the heavy lifting and it's cheap when you purchase it on it's own. With that said if you only use this product you will be leaving some of the soiling behind as it cant remove everything on it's own. So typically if you continue to use sodium percarbonate over and over again you will start to notice your fermenters might start getting a small build up of the other soiling that it's not effective against. I wish it was possible to make a fantastic cleaning product which could be used on a wide range of soiling and only contained one ingredient but the reality is a good cleaner will have at least a few ingredients as there are several different reactions that need to take place in order for a good cleaner to work well. If you look at PBW it contains 7 ingredients in total. We are also making our own powdered brewery wash that will also contain 7 ingredients too. We will stock straight sodium percarbonate as well in 1kg tubs very soon as well but we will push customers to get the full formulation as it simply works better.

 

[KegLand-com-au]

1 fl oz is about 30 mL
Starsan contains Phosphoric acid and a surfactant/detergent, just Phosphoric on its own wont be quite the same.

Another good spot steriliser is 70% alcohol (water and ethanol, methylated spirits...) works really as a pickup and spray.
Mark

Would totally agree with this. Ethanol spray is awesome. Also great for filling up your airlock in the fermenter too.
https://www.kegland.com.au/catalogsearch/result/?q=ethanol

 

[fungrel]

Would totally agree with this. Ethanol spray is awesome. Also great for filling up your airlock in the fermenter too.
https://www.kegland.com.au/catalogsearch/result/?q=ethanol

Feels like you spruik your wares at every opportunity, could've sworn that this was against forum rules...