Labels, be gone!

I'm fairly new here, and for all I know, what I ran across tonight is old hat, and everyone already knows about it, but I thought I'd share, in case someone else out there has fingernails full of adhesive and wet paper, and a heart full of despair.

Tonight was bottling night. The first of many, I'm hoping. I like to brew in an eco-friendly fashion, and, I'm cheap, so bottling night involved gathering wine bottles from pretty much everyone I knew, removing labels, cleaning, and sanitizing.

I'd soaked my bottles for an inordinately long amount of time, and most of my labels still weren't peeling off well, so I left them while I tidied up the kitchen some more. As I was cleaning off the glass top stove, I looked at the tool in my hand, and had an epiphany. That little scraper tool that you can buy for scraping the stuck on bits off the top of a ceramic or glass top stove is PERFECT for removing labels, along with all their attendant adhesive gooeyness from those recycled bottles! What's more, the Stove Brite stuff that usually comes along with that when you buy a stove cleaning kit at Menards or Home Depot is really good at removing stubborn adhesive from bottles as well. I think rinsing well in that case goes without saying.

So there's my tip. I'm pretty sure, based on the amount of time I spent on one stupid bottle when I got started, that I save myself around two hours of time tonight, thus enabling me to proceed to the accomplished feeling of viewing a row of neatly corked bottles, all containing a vintage of my own making! (Ginger wine, btw.) Hopefully, this will help someone else whose environmental sense, and/or thriftiness cause them to recycle bottles!

Good deal. I have had great success with a 30 min soak in oxiclean solution. Rips through the labels like no ones business

I agree with Komocabo, just soak the bottles in Oxy and hot water for an hour or two. Most beer bottle labels just fall off of the bottles.

PBW>Oxiclean

I tried the Oxiclean a couple days ago for the first time. Super hot water in the sink with a couple/few scoops of Oxiclean and loaded the bottles, within a half hour most of them literally floated right off the bottle. Rinse them really well and a soak in Starsan removed the "slickness" of the Oxiclean.

As a note, I was told ONLY to use the Oxiclean Free, the one with the green lid.

Yes, definitely the Oxiclean Free. The others have chemicals and perfumes. Seems obvious to use the one that is "free" of those additives.

Cheers!

Komocabo said:

Yes, definitely the Oxiclean Free. The others have chemicals and perfumes. Seems obvious to use the one that is "free" of those additives.

Cheers!

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When you're soaking your bottles do you submerge the whole bottle or keep them upright (by filling them w/water only)?

If they're submerged are there any after affects on the subsequent beer or wine put in them?

boondocksaint said:

When you're soaking your bottles do you submerge the whole bottle or keep them upright (by filling them w/water only)?

If they're submerged are there any after affects on the subsequent beer or wine put in them?

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I submerge the bottles and there is no effects on the beer since you wash the bottle off well afterwords.

I scrape most of the tough labels off with my Alaskan Ulu, works great on foil or other tough labels. Soak them in very hot waterin a filled sink, scrub them with a stinless scrub pad. No problem getting them off.

the back of a butter knife works well on those stubborn labels.

b

Definitely submerge, else the bottles will just float and likely not soak where it needs to. Like the others have said, just wash/rinse really well and you'll be good to go. I know I cleaned over 200 bottles over time, and I wish I knew this earlier on. Now I keg, so go figure. But I have boxes of de-labeled bottles that I have given away to fellow brewers.