obvious priming/bottling questions

[brownrice]

How do you avoid contaminating your bottling bucket and all of your bottles?

Getting a designated buggy bucket just for bottling seems silly, but any way around it seems overly complicated.

Also, I assume that every bottle that once contained a sour cannot be reused for a non-sour?

 

[TheMadKing]

Can't you just sterilize them with boiling water or bleach after bottling a sour?

 

[slym2none]

Glass should come pretty clean no matter what was in it before. If you're worried, bleach-bomb them, rinse well a few times (!), & let dry for a few days. If you are really worried, do the above then bake the bottles at 350° for a while. If that doesn't kill most anything you might be worried about, IDK what will.

 

[brownrice]

lemme make sure I got this straight;

when adding priming sugar/bottling:
Just use a glass carboy and then clean the bugs out? There are many ways to do so, but that's a crazy amount of effort when I'm only using it for like a half hour. I feel like for 6 bucks I could just get a dedicated bucket, which saves time/energy/risk of infecting the next batch.

bottles-
Normally I just rinse and drip-dry after pouring, and on bottling day I'll spritz with StarSan and fill while they're still a bit foamy.

But for sours, follow the above except add the in-between step of bleaching bombing. Right? If a few bottles get turnt, I'd be disappointed but not devastated. If the bottles are dunked into StarSan, could that become a vector for infecting every bottle after that?


should I relax and have a homebrew?

 

[TheMadKing]

lemme make sure I got this straight;

when adding priming sugar/bottling:
Just use a glass carboy and then clean the bugs out? There are many ways to do so, but that's a crazy amount of effort when I'm only using it for like a half hour. I feel like for 6 bucks I could just get a dedicated bucket, which saves time/energy/risk of infecting the next batch.

bottles-
Normally I just rinse and drip-dry after pouring, and on bottling day I'll spritz with StarSan and fill while they're still a bit foamy.

But for sours, follow the above except add the in-between step of bleaching bombing. Right? If a few bottles get turnt, I'd be disappointed but not devastated. If the bottles are dunked into StarSan, could that become a vector for infecting every bottle after that?


should I relax and have a homebrew?

It really depends how often you make sour beers vs non-sours and how much you consider effort.

Overall that process looks good, except you need to be cleaning your bottling bucket with star-san as well.

I highly doubt that star-san could become a vector for infection even with lacto or brett, but I'm no expert.

 

[sweetcell]

you should use a dedicated bottling bucket for sour beers. some folks claim you can clean them, i (and many others) are dubious of this claim.

bottles can be sanitized. main challenge is ensuring you don't have any cake/residue left in the bottle, but a solid rinse after you pour the previous beer should take care of that. i soak my bottles in PBW overnight, which may be overkill (but certainly doesn't hurt).

i've never used bleach on any of my brewing equipment, not sure i'd want to. star san does a fine job of killing bugs on smooth surfaces like glass or stainless as long as the surfaces don't have caked on grime for the bugs to hide in (hence the PBW soak).

as long as star san maintains a pH below 3.5 (or is it 3.0?), it cannot transmit bugs. maybe if there is some gunk, like dried yeast residue, that is thick enough to prevent star san from getting all the way through it, some bugs could survive in the middle of the grime but that sounds like an extreme case... just skim off any chunks in your star san!