Cleaning & Preparing Bottles for Brewing an English Mild Beer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. This next segment we're going to talk about how we get our bottles ready to use for bottling. We've kind of finished off our primary fermentation. You don't have any more bubbles coming out of your air lock. Your beer is becoming nice and clear if you have a nice glass carboy, you have a nice sediment of yeast down on the bottom and now your getting ready to decide it's about ready for bottling. So before we start bottling we want to make sure we have enough clean bottles. For a five gallon batch, you?re going to need about 60 12 ounce bottles or 40 16 ounce bottles. Now if you've bought your beer bottles from the store, you're really not going to need to worry about doing a very intense cleaning of them. However, if your friend comes over and gives you a nice bottle of beer that he had around saying that I know you can use this for home brewing you're going to need to take some more in basic cleaning operations. The first thing your going to want to do is do a rinse of the bottle just in your own sink. Shake it up and pour it out and that will get most of the beer residue out. If they gave you a bottle that has been aging for a while kind of with just a little beer in the bottom, you might want to check the bottom and see if there is a whole bunch of gunk down there, if there is you might be better off cleaning it out, or throwing it away. If you bought a bottle washer, you can attach this to your sink and use this to forcefully jet out your bottles which will help with the cleaning process and also with some rinsing processes if you need to do that. Now that you've rinsed out your bottle you?re going to want to put it in to some kind of soaking solution. I recommend either using the chlorine that we talked about earlier or using the straight A. This will break up the gum around the label and help you get it out earlier and also break up any deposits within the bottle. After your soaking your beer bottles for a little while, the labels will in general come off pretty easily. Sometimes you may need to use a more aggressive pad to clean them off, but overall just work on it and you'll get them clean pretty quickly. After soaking them in the cleaner you?re going to want to rinse them out either using your bottle washer or just your sink. Now that you got your clean bottles, you?re going to want to soak them in one of the sanitizing solutions to be used on your bottling day. You?re going to want to use iortafore or chlorine at that nice concentration however you are going to have to rinse it or one step or the five star star sand."