Cleaning Bottles for Home Brewed Barley Wine

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this next segment, we are going to talk about how we get our bottles ready to use for bottling. Alright, so we've kind of finished off our primary fermentation; you don't have anymore bubbles coming out of your airlock. Your beer is becoming nice and clear if you have it in a nice glass carboy; you have a nice sediment of yeast down at the bottom and now you're getting ready to decide that it's about time for bottling. So, before we start bottling, we want to make sure that we have enough clean bottles. For a five gallon batch, you are going to need about sixty twelve-ounce bottles or forty sixteen-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. However, if your friend comes over and he gives you a nice bottle of beer that he had around saying that "I know that you can use this for home brewing." You're going to need to take some more than basic cleaning operations. The first thing you're going to want to do is a rinse of the bottle, just from 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's been aging for a while, kind of just with a little beer at the bottom, you might want to check the bottom and see if there's 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 into some sort of a cleaning 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 that out earlier and also help break up any deposits within the bottle. After you've been soaking your beer bottles for a little while, your labels will, in general, come off pretty easily. Sometimes you may need to use a more aggressive pad to 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've got your clean bottles, you are going to want to soak them in the sanitizing solution to be used on your bottling day. You're going to want to use Iodophor or chlorine at that nice concentration however, you're going to have to rinse it or "One Step" or the "Five Star Star.""