- Joined
- Feb 16, 2012
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- 3,368
- Reaction score
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- Location
- Either in the brewery or on the road
A few days soak in a tub/tote with (initially warm) water and a powdered (clothes) washing detergent, such as Surf. But pretty much any detergent will do.
Some will float off within a day, most after 2 or 3 days. Those that are stubborn, either toss, or let soak a few more days.
Use a stiff hand brush to remove any remaining film of clinging glue or residue. Use a bottle brush on the inside.
Rinse inside and outside well (e.g., Jet Spray washer on faucet) with hot water. Inspect inside and outside thoroughly.
Then sanitize (Starsan) and they're ready to fill.
I always save my own previously cleaned bottles as much as possible. I know their whereabouts and when rinsed out and/or soaked right after pouring out, it saves time on the next cleaning.
I pretty much do the same thing, alternating between PBW, OxyClean Free, etc., in extended hot water soaks in a laundry sink. I've had good luck using a mix of Oxy, TSP and a squirt of 7th Generation (as a surfactant) that seems to work well. The problem with Oxy can be the white residue that gets left behind after drying.
One very serious issue I ran into recently involved wine bottles that were soaked over night in an Oxy-based solution. The water level had drained a bit leaving the neck and upper barrel of some bottles exposed. Where the water had receded it left a pencil-thin white line around the circumference. I tried rinsing and scrubbing, even resorted to a razor scraper on a few to get rid of this 'ring around the collar', but nothing really worked. It was almost as if it was etched into the glass.
A few days later I was part way through bottling several cases of wine with a compression jaw floor corker when the top third of a bottle blew out while the cork was being inserted. There was a perfectly shaped oval disk blown out of one side of the upper portion of the bottle precisely where the soap line had been. The bottle was otherwise intact. Just a smooth edge hole that looked like it had been removed with a laser. I've never seen anything like this before or since, and I've been using and reusing wine bottles for nearly 50 years. It might have been a one-off event, but why did it fail exactly where the surface ring was left by the detergent, and why is it virtually impossible to remove these rings when they appear, either mechanically or with more washing? This issue has only appeared when bottles are partially exposed to the air when soaking for long periods of time, and not when they remain fully under water. With them the powdery residue will usually wipe off a dried bottle with a towel and limited elbow grease.
I'm much more careful about soaking bottles now.